September 16

  

Today's quotation:

Over the years I have come to believe that life is full of unchosen circumstances, that being human has to do with the evolution of our individual consciousness and with it, responsibilities for choice.  Pain and joy both come with life.  I believe that how we respond to what happens to us and around us shapes who we become and has to do with the psyche or the soul’s growth.

Jean Shinoda Bolen

Today's Meditation:

We can't stop things from happening, can we?  And most things that happen in our lives we have no control over at all.  Which leaves us with our reactions to what happens to us, and the way we grow (or don't grow) based on our reactions.  We choose how to react, and those choices help to determine the people we become.

I know people who seem always to react in a way that will make someone else feel guilty for something.  Their reactions typically are self-pitying and designed to make others react.  There are hurricane victims who complain about how unfair life is, and there are those who look at what has happened and decide what needs to be done.  And then they do it, without ever trying to get anyone else to feel the least bit sorry for them.

These are people who have grown.

When something happens that may be negative, the best thing we can do is figure out how to fix it or how to make the best of it.  Whining never helps, not does blaming.  When we choose a mature, responsible reaction to a situation, we choose to grow and to show others just what kinds of reactions are the most appropriate.
Questions to consider:

How do you tend to react to unforeseen circumstances?
Is that how you want to react?

From whom do we learn how to react?

How can our reactions show how much we have or haven't grown?
For further thought:

The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature,
but the fittest are rarely the strong.  The fittest are those
endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability
to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable,
to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.

Dave. E Smalley
   
  

  

  




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