WAS PLEASURE, IS PAIN

Think of your cute, little, seven-year-old, darling self.

In your memory, were you happier, more spontaneous, more creative, innovative, honest, more trusting, more self confident than you are now? Were you less tense, less anxious, less skeptical, less frustrated, less concerned with change or failure? Were you less stressed?

What happened?

Remember, as a kid, the fun of the first, big snowfall, holidays, birthdays, vacations? Do you enjoy them as much since you've become your big, old, mature self?

What happened? Life happened.

You learned the big snowfall brings snow shoveling and traffic jams. Holidays bring family out of the woodwork and the closet. Vacations, you do double work before, double work after, spend the first half winding down and the last half gearing up.

Through these experiences of your life you've learned to react differently to events than you might have reacted the first time you experienced them. It's important to remember, the events didn't change. Snow is snow, holidays are holidays and vacations are vacations.

Which reactions then are correct? Are snowfalls, holidays, vacations a scourge from hell or a blessing from heaven? Yes, and they don't give a rat's which way you view them!

Events just are. If at one point they were acceptable to you, and now they're not acceptable, it's obvious the event didn't change; you did. You have learned and chosen to let events over which you have little or no control drive you nuts. If you don't like now what you did like then and continue to do what you don't like now and did like then, you've got work to do.

If you want to get back the pure childish pleasure you felt when you first experienced snow, holidays and vacations and the like, you have to "unlearn" the bad and remember the good.

An old East Indian saying: "All the struggle to learn and all we have to do is remember." Pretty clever old East Indian, eh?


Lesson: Events have no feelings attached to them; that's your job.