A World with a View

A World with a View

Time for me to write about something more serious. It's the start of another week, so let's psyche ourselves up with some motivational pep talk.

All of us would have experienced periods in our lives when we feel very demotivated, when life itself appears to be like an endless series of repetitive and meaningless tasks. Where are we heading? And when we reflect on all our childhood dreams and how we have fallen short of them, we can't help but feel like a failure sometimes. Could we have done better?

Now, if we constantly regret the past and start gathering together all our failures in life, then we will always feel like a failure. How the world and our lives appear to us is dependent on how we decide to view the world. Yes, we decide how the world appears to us. We give ourselves meaning. Even the most mundane tasks, if executed positively, carries meaning.

The mind is a wonderful instrument if we know how to use it. If I ask you to start picking out everything that's red in colour in your room or office right now, you'll be surprised at how many previously inconspicuous red objects that you can spot in your environment. Look around you, there is a lot of red colour in the world after all, because you have ordered your mind to start noticing it. Repeat with the other colours: blue, green or yellow. You will realize that there's a very fine line separating a world that's blue from one that's red or one that's green or yellow for that matter. We decide what we want to notice.

People who plunge into depression cannot see any positives in their lives at all because their entire frame of mind has been unconsciously programmed to look at everyone and everything as being unsympathetic, unfriendly and oppressive. It is an emotional abyss that can be very difficult to extract oneself from, once one has plunged into it. But there's a fine line separating depression from exuberance; one just need the right triggers.

Some people are always very moody--they go from being very cheerful one day to very sulky the next. These are people who let external events flip them from one state to another. We control our minds--not the people around us or external events that are beyond our control. We decide how we should react to them because there's a space between stimulus and response, which we own. And that is the most important piece of real estate in the world!

The world is a mirror that reflects back on our own mental state. The mind filters input and synthesizes reality. To change the world, change the one inside first. All it takes is a decision, an effort of the will, a willingness to want to see things in a more positive manner. Why should that be so difficult? Go ask yourself. Heck, it doesn't even consume any calories!