“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
Mark Twain
When things are getting tough in life, we often turn to the world and look for a reason for our pain, our upset, our misery, and as if by magic, we always seem to find the perfect scapegoat. This seems to be temporarily useful, as it serves as help to justify why we feel the way we do. Yet if we take a closer look at the situation we find that the culprit is not out there in the world, but in fact, right where it all started: in our thinking. It is the way we are ‘seeing’ the situation via what we think about it, creating the feeling response we have to it.
Often when we are not in our best space, things don’t look good and we have a greater tendency to take comments and the world more personally. We all do it. During these times of being temporarily out of sorts it is almost impossible to do anything else, that is, until we start understanding that it is coming from a distorted perspective. One which is born of habitual thinking or reactive responses; a way of operating which has become so familiar to us, we hardly even know we are revisiting old patterns of thought again and again. We may look at the situation and think to ourselves: “Oh no, not this again.” Innocent in our belief that it is the world doing its thing to us again, when all that is happening is we are briefly lost in cyclical thinking that is no longer serving us.
A simple example of this is our motor skills. When we were young it took super-colossal effort to reach that seemingly impossible task of firstly crawling, then walking and before our parents knew it, we were running everywhere, so our persistence paid off in the end. Our habitual and reactive patterns of thought are created in exactly the same way. If we think something for long enough, it becomes invisible to us to the point where we only notice the feelings that pattern of thought gives us. It is still only thought, creating our reactive responses.
It never ceases to amaze me how different things look once our head has cleared, we are back in a better space and we discover that we had the solution all along, we just couldn’t see it at the time of our low mood. The late Mr. Sydney Banks said that: ‘Thought is like a magic paintbrush’ and it is on the canvas of our lives that we paint the scenes of our experience. For good or bad. So, if we want to live a life with less emotional pain in it, it is worth keeping this simple yet profound gem of knowledge in mind.
When our mood level is low and the circumstances of our lives looks dismal this is not the time to be discussing important issues or trying to sort our problems out. Instead we should simply relax as much as possible and wait for our better feelings to return, for as we all know, they always do return. No one alive has ever been in a bad mood and stayed in it forever! This process can be compared to those times when we can’t think of a name or a word and we wrack our brains and still cant find it, until sometime later in the day, when we are not focusing on this issue anymore, it magically pops back into our heads. Our good mood is like this, if we leave all the bad stuff alone, as much as we can and just get on with our lives, the solution we have been searching for appears before our very eyes.
This is what we call wisdom, innate heath, or common sense. It is available to all humans at all times, and if we just get out of its way and get quiet, even for a few moments, it will reward us with the answer; that we are all that we have ever been searching for, we are the solution to all and every problem. Unlike the worriment we began with, which is simply an illusion created in a low state of mind, the relaxed mind only sees solutions.
Now go and have a wonderful life, you have all the tools you ever needed to do so.
