16 Jan 2008

Your happiness is intertwined with your outlook on life

That is what the fortune section on my Orkut profile reads. My very first reaction looking at it in the morning was "whose isn't?". As I progressed through the day and kept visiting Orkut to check for new scraps my attention was re-drawn to this message and the initial reaction kept getting re-affirmed.

There is a dictum that I firmly believe in- You cannot change a situation and that really doesnt matter, what matters is how you choose to react to it.

I have been through a lot of thick and thin in life and every adversity has left a mark on me. But unfortunately for a long period of time there were a set of events that kept occuring and evoking the very same set of responses from me. Without realising I was behaving the Pavlov Dog, eliciting the same pair of stimulus-response again and again. After repeating the process N number of times during a phase of complete exhaustion (physical, mental and emotional) I realised, what I wasdoing was an excercise in futility. It also helped me see the bigger picture of life. Life will keep throwing things at you which are difficult to come to terms with, people are going to be indifferent and situations are going to be daunting. Its not in our hands to change any of this, but what we really can change and the thing that can really make a difference in our lives is how we choose to react to situtations. Not only present situtations but also to the closet ghosts which keep hallucinating the lives of so many of us.

And here something that I keep using frequently to pep-talk myslelf-

"It doesn't matter how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." - Quote from the movie Rocky Balboa