REALITY SLAP: I Am Powerless Over the Unchangeable!



As I’ve said before, life is about choices. Every second of every day we have choices to make. Most of these choices revolve around retaining our personal power or giving it away. When we choose to fight realities that we cannot change, we are actually choosing to give our personal power away. We are choosing to be life’s big fat victim. In doing so, we sit and whine like four year olds, spouting out deeply ingrained mantras like “But it’s not supposed to be this way!” Whine, whine… whine, whine, whine… and whine some more. Poor me. Poor me. Life is soooooo unfair to me!

Reality Slap! No life is not unfair to me. I am unfair to me. I am the one who is refusing to accept the reality that I cannot change. I am the one who is freely GIVING AWAY MY OWN POWER, my own key to happiness, by insisting that life be the way that I WANT, instead of being the way that it IS. I am the one who has created my own problem and I am the only one who can choose to solve that problem and thus make my life better.

As an example, I want you to think about the realities of life in the heart of winter. Picture yourself in Chicago, Milwaukee or Philadelphia. The skies are grey--- day, after day, after day. You hate grey skies. They depress you. Every morning you get up demanding sunshine only to find more grey skies. Endless clouds fill your eyes. “BUT IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS WAY!!!” is the mantra that plays endlessly through your head. You whine. You groan. You're miserable. You are the victim of your own making. Why? Because you are refusing to accept a reality that you cannot change. You don’t have to like the grey skies, but you DO have to ACCEPT them.

You have a friend who doesn’t especially like cloudy days either. But is she ravaged with depression over them? No. Why? Because she chooses to accept the fact that she has no power over the weather. She understands that it’s cloudy and that’s just the way it is and she chooses to make the best of it. She thinks about how much better her coffee tastes when it’s nippy and overcast outside. She likes the way it makes her feel truly warm and safe inside. She also loves the idea of sitting in front of a burning fire. She loves feeling the warmth of the flames as much as she loves watching them dance over the logs in her fireplace. And a fire always feels best, always feels nourishing to her soul on a cloudy day. I mean, who burns a fire on a sunny day? There’s not much comfort in that.

So your friend is content and reasonably happy with each passing cloudy day because she chooses to accept them as they are, even though she doesn’t really like them, and she is thus able to find comfort in them. In effect, she has chosen to retain her personal power by accepting what she cannot change and making the best of it. She has chosen to be a true architect of her day and of her well-being.

You, on the other hand, have chosen to throw away your personal power by refusing to accept that the weather isn’t the way you want it to be. You have chosen to make yourself a victim of a reality that you cannot change. You have chosen to be miserable about the fact that things aren’t the way you want them to be. You have given all of your power away to the clouds in the sky. And you have chosen to whine and mope around. You have chosen to place yourself into a deeper and deeper depressed funk. Now you need to ask yourself “What other totally insane thing can I do today to make my own self even more miserable today?”

Get the picture? I hope this is a huge REALITY SLAP for all of us who thrive on choosing to control the uncontrollable. Life doesn’t make us miserable. We make ourselves miserable by refusing to accept reality. Accept what you cannot change. You don’t have to like it, but you can choose to accept it and look for the good in it. Take back your personal power by choosing to accept what you cannot change and find comfort in the fact that life doesn’t have to be the way you want it to be. Learn to love life as it unfolds before you.

Comments

  1. E.S. KraayNovember 1, 2012 at 12:05 PM

    As a nationally licensed youth soccer coach, I worked with thousands of young men and women for two decades. In line with your post, I would tell my proteges that there are many, many things you will face that you have no control over: the weather; who will referee your game; the condition of the field... the list goes on. I would follow that statement with this advice: because there are things you cannot control, you must do your best to take charge of those things you can: getting a good night sleep before game day; eating healthily; training effectively... and that list goes on as well. There are things in life that can blindside us when we least expect it, and for that reason, we must remain mindful of those things we can influence.

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