132 - Anything Can Happen

“How ridiculous and unrealistic is the man who is astonished at anything that happens in life.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book 12

Show Notes:

• How often do we think that something in life shouldn’t happen to us?
• As if we are somehow immune to the things that happen to anyone else in life.
• How often do we think that we are owed something?
• As if we are somehow privileged above others, that we deserve something
• We may think it’s unfair when something we worked hard for fails to materialize.
• We may think it’s unfair that someone we love gets cancer, that they didn’t deserve it.
• We may think we deserve a perfect partner because go to the gym workout and wear nice clothes.
• The world is full of all kinds of stories about people getting hit with the unexpected and didn’t get what they wanted.
• Who determines what is fair and unfair?
• So much in our lives that is simply up to chance, where we have no control over it.
• We never deserve anything.
• Now this doesn’t mean that all is lost.
• Let go of trying to control the things that we can’t control, and focus on what we can.
• We cannot control the circumstances that happen to us.
• We cannot control the outcome.
• What we can control is how we respond to the things that happen to us.
• If we are diagnosed with an serious illness, we can’t control that it happened to us.
• We can’t control whether we’ll recover from it.
• If we follow the prescriptions of our doctor, we increase our probability of a positive outcome.
• We may not get the job we think we deserve. But we can increase the probability that we’ll get a good job if we put the work in.
• We can also choose our attitude towards towards our situation. We can be angry, we can be sad, we can react in many different ways.
• We’re going to have deal with it anyway, so if we can approach it in the most helpful way we can, we reduce our overall suffering.
• I think that most suffering in the world happens when we try to control the things that we can’t and fail to control what we can.
• Life is full of surprises, but it shouldn’t be.

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