In Control

The past couple of days, I've not been in the best mood. I've been doing my best to keep my positive energy high and focus on things that make me happy, but at the end of the day the tears have won out.

I talked with someone tonight who made me realize why I was allowing myself to get so down. I have been letting someone else control me. Not in a dominance "Do what I say" kind of way, but in thinking about what their responses to my actions will be. By trying to figure out or worrying about how other people will respond to what we do, we are allowing them to control how we act. We should just do what we feel needs to be done, and do it in a way that we are comfortable with. We can deal with the consequences later, but we stay true to our own feelings when we do not contaminate our thoughts with the variations of how others "might" respond to the things we do and say. By thinking of someone in a positive or negative light, we sometimes alter how we react to them or the things they do.

I read somewhere a while ago that things are not necessarily "good" or "bad," they just are. If we can learn to let go of the positive and negative connotations that we associate with certain things, people or situations, we can more easily deal with those things, people and situations. That is not to say that we need to leave our emotions completely out in the cold. That's simply to say that we acknowledge the emotions we feel at the moment, then allow ourselves to look at whatever it is in a neutral way in order to better deal with it and move on.

By accepting that we cannot control the actions of others, we can better control ourselves. By allowing ourselves to be happy - as happy as we can in whatever situation we are presented with - we ripple that happiness out to others and affect everyone around us. By appreciating the neutrality of everything around us, we can learn to deal with things in a more level-headed manner, rather than allowing our emotions to cause us to make clouded judgements. None of these are necessarily easy tasks, depending on the situation at hand, but in the end I believe they are all worth the work!