Heaven is in Your Head
‘The place one’s in, though, doesn’t make any contribution to peace of mind: it’s the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself.’ Seneca – Letters from a Stoic.
He was a wise man that Seneca. In his letters to his nephew he wrote about many subjects we should dwell upon such as wealth, wisdom and even death. Seneca realised that we spend so much time worrying about death that the life we are left with is worse than the death we fear so much.
Milton hit the nail on the head as well when he said
I’ve come to realise this when I’ve seen people who should be miserable (by my expectations) actually act very happy and vice versa. People with no money and nowhere to live were overjoyed and people with all the money and?possessions?were acting as if they had the weight of the world on their shoulders.
Now I understand. No matter what is going on outside, it is out interpretation of it which determines how we feel.
Paul Browning
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Tag:Freedom
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Very philosophic… The world is how we look at it, it’s all upon us.
Everything is relative. When using a word to describe something, we should think “compared to what”. She is beautiful. Compared to whom? This is hard. Compared to what? This is comfortable. Compared to what?
We don’t all have the same reference point. We all come from different walks of life, so we may have different perspectives about the same situation. A man who takes suffers a salary cut to $30k will be disappointed. However that $30k is a fortune to a man who has never made that much money before.
“Mind over Matter”. Our attitudes can really make a difference in how a situation works out. Lets talk marriage for a moment. The vows say ‘for better or worse’. If things go bad, and you develop feelings of resentment, things can only get worse. If you ‘roll with the punches’ and try to make the best out of the situation, your marriage can survive anything.
“?The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.?
~John Milton, Paradise Lost – So True, and beautifully spoken.”
It is amazing how much our emotions can vary about the same situation. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and emotions.
The only feelings that matter are your own because they are the only ones that you can control.
Sometimes, we can’t control our emotions. At least I can’t.
I think that the more you have, the more you want. When you don’t have very much, you are more grateful for what you do have, which often has nothing to do with how much you own. The people who I know who are the happiest are the people who are grateful for their families and their experiences, not what they possess.
Your outlook is everything. If you are positive and take things as they come, you are going to be able to apply that philosophy toward many obstacles you encounter.