From Curse to Blessing

So here’s a hard, but helpful and hopeful truth, brought to you by the Dalia Lama, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou and countless others. 

 

You can’t control what life brings to you or how people treat you, but you CAN control how you respond to it. 

 

That deserves to be read and spoken over and over again, like a mantra reminding your demon victim-mentality voices to leave you be. We all know how the world has put its foot on our neck, failed to recognize our promise and genius, thrown shade when we deserved sunlight, cast us down into the vale of tears and sorrow. If you know someone who has escaped all of this, I’d like to meet him or her or them. Seen from one angle, this is our common bond and should be the reason to treat each other a little more kindly. 

 

Instead, so many choose to blame others for their misfortune, to try to grow taller by making others feel smaller, to whine and wail about their sad sorry lives. Some make a habit and a lifestyle of it, while others throw a small little pity party and then decide to get on with it. But the wise amongst us all agree that suffering is our opportunity to grow larger and kinder and more compassionate, to others and to ourselves. 

 

Here’s an example from my own life about the decision to change how I react and respond to things that bother me. It seems trivial and it is in the big picture, but it’s a good example of how you can flip from victimhood to empowerment. As I believe I’ve made clear in these blogposts, I hate these driverless cars in San Francisco and curse every time I see one. But what does that do? The cars don’t know about it, don’t care about it, can’t care about it. My anger does nothing to change it and it keeps bumming me out and ruining my day. 

 

So my new approach is that every time I see one, I send a silent blessing to someone in need. Now the more I see, the happier I feel. Boom! Turned the whole thing around. I’ve been kissing the air for three days now and it feels so much better. 

 

It’s a big leap from this little exercise to forgiving those who truly have wronged you, to bearing up under the systemic toxic practices that unjustly target you, to getting through the timeless astonishment that any just God would take your loved one away from you. But the difference is simply in scale— the principle remains the same.

Give it a try and see what happens.