Page 67 of the Book talks about how situations are not entirely our fault; page 62 says that our troubles are of our own making.
We do not cause every situation in our lives.
But the situation is not the trouble.
The trouble is the disturbance.
When something unpleasant happens to me, I am not responsible for the experience of the event.
But, when I recall it a thousand times and re-feel the same cascade of feelings, who is responsible for that?
When I form opinions and judgements, when I interpret and extrapolate, when I draw conclusions, who is responsible for that?
When I hold onto a memory of an unpleasant experience, distorting it every time I replay it, and exclude from my mind the tens of thousands of instances of human decency and kindness, who is responsible for that?
If, at the end of the week, you made a list of every single kind, loving, polite, civil, helpful, thoughtful, dutiful, patient etc. act you have experienced or witnessed, you would run out of paper, because almost every single human interaction is one in which people play by the rules of decency.
But no one obsesses about goodness.
You laugh at a joke once or twice at most.
You can cry at a slight for years. One would have to conclude there is a perverse pleasure in victimhood.
You choose the contents of your mind, ultimately, and it is those that dictate your experience of the world.
Max Frisch said that there are no natural disasters, only human disasters. Nature (including other people) is just doing what it is programmed to do. It is all in the perception.
We do not cause every situation in our lives.
But the situation is not the trouble.
The trouble is the disturbance.
When something unpleasant happens to me, I am not responsible for the experience of the event.
But, when I recall it a thousand times and re-feel the same cascade of feelings, who is responsible for that?
When I form opinions and judgements, when I interpret and extrapolate, when I draw conclusions, who is responsible for that?
When I hold onto a memory of an unpleasant experience, distorting it every time I replay it, and exclude from my mind the tens of thousands of instances of human decency and kindness, who is responsible for that?
If, at the end of the week, you made a list of every single kind, loving, polite, civil, helpful, thoughtful, dutiful, patient etc. act you have experienced or witnessed, you would run out of paper, because almost every single human interaction is one in which people play by the rules of decency.
But no one obsesses about goodness.
You laugh at a joke once or twice at most.
You can cry at a slight for years. One would have to conclude there is a perverse pleasure in victimhood.
You choose the contents of your mind, ultimately, and it is those that dictate your experience of the world.
Max Frisch said that there are no natural disasters, only human disasters. Nature (including other people) is just doing what it is programmed to do. It is all in the perception.