Don't Change Your Circumstances , Change Your Attitude !

Some seasons in life are just more difficult than others. Period.

Maybe it’s because of a project you’ve taken on, maybe you have lost a loved one, maybe you’re worried about money or you ended a relationship or maybe you’re in a relationship that is taking ton of your energy

It’s inevitable. There’s no escaping it.

Some seasons are just hard.

But is it possible you are making things harder than they need to be—simply by having a bad attitude about it? Marianne Williamson says the key to transforming any situation is reframing it—looking at it from a different direction.

If there are many ways to see a situation, are you looking at it from more than one direction?

It’s like a kid on a roller coaster who closes his eyes and buries his head in his fear-crossed arms on parts that are most terrifying or most unexpected to him. His attempt to protect himself from the circumstance doesn’t actually save him. It just blocks his view.

Lately I had an epiphany about this.

What if my response to difficult circumstances is making the circumstances even harder than they need to be?

When the steep hills come, when things seem to flip upside down, when I realize there’s no way to get off this “ride”, what if closing my eyes or turning my attention doesn’t actually keep me from harm? What if it actually just blocks what I’m supposed to be learning?

What if it is keeping me from all the good that is trying to come to me?

What if what I really need is a change in attitude?

I love the image of the roller coaster because the picture that comes to mind is of a little kid who decides to stop being scared of the ride. He realizes he’s on it already, anyway. There’s nothing he can do about that.

So he might as well enjoy it.

Instead of closing his eyes, he opens them. Instead of crossing his arms and burring his head, he looks up and lets go of the handle bar. He lets the wind blow through his hair. He smiles. He’s having fun.

His circumstances haven’t changed. Only his attitude has.

What would happen if we changed our attitudes when we couldn’t change our circumstances?

Maybe we’d feel the wind on our face and through our hair.

Maybe we would smile instead of hunkering down, afraid.

We can’t always choose our circumstances

But we can choose our response to them.

We can choose not to take ourselves too seriously—to laugh at our biggest mistakes. We can choose not to let stress get the best of us. When we’re up to our knees in paperwork, we can make a game out of it. When we’re stressed about finances, we have gratitude for beans and rice the same way would  for an expensive steak.

We can choose to focus on the light at the end of the tunnel (rather than the dark tunnel itself).

Maybe, if we do this, we’ll start enjoying this crazy ride—rather than burying our faces and waiting for the day we’ll be able to get off.