You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control what you do with what happens to you.
Some cliches are valuable and actually provide wisdom.
There’s also a lot of unspoken side notes that you can discover. Like that even if you can’t directly control what happens to you, your response to what happens to you can indirectly influence what happens to you in the future.
Having a proactive response to what happens to you will often lead to a better outcome.
So while you don’t control what happens to you, you actually do, its just not a direct control where you get to decide all the details and each individual outcome but more of the general direction of certain aspects. You just dont get to control what aspects sometimes.
If you prime yourself for positive outcomes by taking positive action, you will get more positive outcomes, even if you can’t decide which out outcomes are positive.
You can’t control your emotions but you can control your focus. It works the same way.
Some emotions pop up naturally and their appearence is inevitable, but you can create a better environement inside your mind and heart so that more desirable emotions are likely to pop up and the emotions you don’t want to feel will dissipate faster.
Your focus is where your power lies. This is where free will and your ability to shape your life and your world lies.
What you focus on will determine the course of your life and your impact on the world.
Don’t deny what’s unpleasant. Unpelasant feelings need to be processed and unpleasant truths need to be faced. That doesn’t mean dwelling on them though.
Once you’ve sat with them long enough have an honest look, they serve no purpose. Find a more pleasant thing to focus on, a course of action worth pursuing, anything that feels better.
It takes some training to be able to avoid getting stuck on the negative, but that’s what meditation is for. You observe your thoughts but don’t enfafe with them and so once they are tired, they leave you alone.
If you engage negative thoughts, they’ll grow, they thrive on attention. If you just observe them, they get tired and disappear, or at least retreat, and you can bring your focus back to something that actually serves you.
This is how you hack reality and create the life you want to create, or at least something that feels much better than where you started.
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Dream - Dystopian Dreams
