”One evening, as I was coming home, I saw a worm on the ground. The rain had stopped for about an hour and it had left the green space and went on the sidewalk. When I was little, together with other children, we sometimes took the worms and smashed them on the asphalt to see how the pieces of worms became, in return, other worms. I know, we were cruel children, as maybe small children are when they explore the world.
The regeneration capacity of these ringed is amazing.
But I’m thinking about how people are. If, in one way or another, life smashes us, it will take us years to recover. Negative emotions remain attached to us for a long time, just as caramels remain attached to children’s wisdom tooths. Our brain is built to quickly identify what’s negative. But it is harder with what is positive. There, in a strange way, we behave like a Teflon pan: nothing sticks on us (I’m exaggerating, of course, but what’s positive is harder to stick, in general).
We all went through hard times, some seemed impossible to take in their time. But if we look back, we recognize the difficulty and I hope we are proud that we have managed to overcome them.
Here are some possible approaches to get through difficulties a little easier:
Think about the things you are grateful for. You don’t need anything major, the fact that you are healthy is in itself a great thing, you can be grateful. When we learn to appreciate the good part of our lives, the degree of satisfaction increases, the risk of depression decreases.
Take a look at what’s good in your life. I had a dear colleague who, when I was upset with someone, said to me: look at us, at the others, it’s not worth seeing only what a person said or did and generalize. We, the others, see things differently, you don’t deserve to see only negatively and we, the others, don’t deserve it.
Think about whether what you are doing is helping or harming you. Sometimes we can’t change a situation. But we can consciously choose to be prisoners of what it was, what it could have been, or to pay attention to the present, to what appears in our lives. For example, we can choose to be prisoners of a relationship that ended in reality but not ended in our minds, instead of being present, open to what each day brings us.
This imprisonment makes us have nothing to lose but nothing else, to be suspended outside our lives.
Pascal, the French philosopher of the seventeenth century, said that man is like a reed, the weakest in nature; but it is a thoughtful reed. Like reeds, we can be bent by the wind, by unfavorable events, but we have the ability to recover, to be upright again.”
via: spotmedia.ro