Trouble, how many ways do I detest thee? Let me count the ways.”
~Not Quite William Shakespeare.

In a lot of ways we do create our own reality but sometimes undesirable events occur in our lives in which we have no say whatsoever. A bolt of lightning, for instance, that kills or maims us. We could roll out the ancient argument that the bolt from the blue had to do with karmic debt from evil deeds committed in a past life. That’s a little-too-neat a package for my taste even if it might be true.

The bumper sticker “Shit Happens” strikes me as a more sensible way to explain the human condition from the perspective of being currently involved in the human condition. Perhaps “It Happens” is even more sensible because that expresses our innate inability to thoroughly understand what’s going on in any logical sense.

There are plenty of words to describe the physical and emotional troubles that might befall us, including stress, upset, anguish, accidents, upheaval, confusion, hurt, predicaments, entanglements, catastrophes, illness, trauma and more. These are only the categories, not specific situations like stepping on a rusty nail or getting hit in the head with a brick.

When we feel like crap, what can we do about it? Our choices are many, most of them not much help at all. We can cry, get mad, get revenge, punish an innocent bystander, give up, indulge in the same actions that may have contributed to our dilemma in the first place, and one of our special favorites, blame someone else.

On reflecting on my own life, I recall plenty of times when I reacted to bad situations in the ways listed above. The results were generally undesirable. I know now the results were not favorable because I was using the same kind of “thinking” that I had used in the past.

Over 35 years ago, plagued with numerous problems in my life, I abandoned thinking about the situation. I simply stared out the window at a beautiful spring morning. There I found the calmness within myself, that quiet still place that we all have within ourselves. Letting go of any attempt to “think things through,” pure thoughts came to me, came through me in the calmness. The path was clear and in following it my life changed for the better in ways that I could never have imagined.