Finding the Good in Everything, No Matter How Painful (704 hits)
..."It's your choice how you view things. In the words of Shakespeare, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2). Events are only negative from your limited perspective. All you have to do is change your view and everything improves, as if by magic.
All this is mixed up with other important perspective changers, like gratitude and forgiveness. You can change the whole world around you by letting go of disappointment, bitterness, anger and resentment.
They say revenge is good; a dish that is better served cold (pre-meditated). Oh no it’s not. It’s a disgusting meal that will poison all your life if you let it. And the “triumph” of revenge does not taste good… ever. Or not for more than a fleeting moment, before you come to the realization that you hurt THEM but it didn’t, in the end, make you feel any better whatsoever.
That means he or she beat you in the end. Revenge is the loser’s path.
Better to reframe the supposed hurt in more positive terms. It makes you feel good and that’s an even better way to spite your enemies! That means YOU win in the end! Today I can easily picture the dismay on my first wife’s lover’s face, when I hug him and say, “Thank you!” because a number of things were done at the time which made it clear that the pair intended to make it more damaging and painful than it need have been (see also Boom! #94 Breaking Up Intelligently). It will spoil their fun to realize I benefitted immensely from the outcomes.
Bernie Siegel quotes from a wonderful essay in his book Love, Medicine and Miracles which always makes me weep. It’s called “Lessons From The Art Of Surgery” by New York surgeon and prize-winning author Richard Seltzer, in which he describes observing the loving presence of a god:
The young woman speaks. “Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “it will. It is because the nerve was cut.”
She nods, and is silent. But the young man smiles.
“I like it,” he says. “It is kind of cute.”
All at once I know who he is. I understand and lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works. I remembered that the gods appeared in ancient Greece as mortals, and I hold my breath and let the wonder in.
What kind of man could have found it in his heart to say that his wife’s twisted face was kind of cute? No bitterness or anger from him, that his beloved is hurt. Truly, he must have been a god…"
