Face it, sometimes bad things happen to us. Oftentimes, it’s simply the result of bad luck: we find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Other times, we’re the ones making bad decisions, and those poor choices generally lead to bad outcomes.
In some of these situations, we find that there remain constant, daily reminders of those bad experiences. A trivial example would be if we were pressure-washing our house and lingered in one spot too long, creating a hole in the siding right next to our back door. Every time we walk outside, we would be reminded of our mistake.
In some things, we are lucky to be “blessed” with a daily reminder of the consequences of our actions. But the rest of the time, the reminder exists only in our memory, with no visible outward indication of our internal mental state.
The funny thing is that regardless of whether we’re physically reminded of some consequence every day, or if the event simply exists in our memory, our most prudent course of action remains the same.
When such an item makes an appearance, whenever a memory enters our stream of consciousness, we are the ones who get to decide how much of an impact it has on our current state of mind.
How and why a thought arises remains a mystery to us. We have little control over what appears in our moment-to-moment stream of consciousness. We do, however, have some degrees of control over how long we dwell on a specific thought.
Regardless of the way that a thought imposes itself onto our awareness, becoming part of the contents of our consciousness, how much we allow it to affect us is almost entirely under our control. We get to decide the extent to which that specific idea impacts our current state of mind; how we let those memories affect us is entirely up to us.
As we currently have no reliable method of time travel, the things that have happened in the past are destined to remain exactly that: in the past. There is nothing we can do to affect things that have already happened. The best we can do is to try to make the most of the things we’ve learned, putting all those important lessons to effective use to help us in the present.
While we can’t control what pops into our head, we do have some level of control over what happens next. We can dwell on those problematic memories, or we can change the subject, directing our attention to the next bright, shiny object coming over our mental horizon.
We get to have a say in what stays top of mind. It’s in our best interest to exercise that control, to whatever extent we can, in order to make the most of our current situation.
No man is free who cannot command himself.
Pythagoras
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Thanks, Joe
