Attitude, mindset, state of mind.
All these ideas of how do we interpret what’s going on? How do we look at our lives? It seems like we have so much ability to really decide how we want to make sense of what’s going on, so that even in- you could have two different people with exactly the same situation, but because of a different mindset, their experience of life can be totally different.
And this seems to be one of the most powerful ways that we can change our lives, is through simply changing our interpretation.
Now of course, it’s no substitute for actually making real changes in the external world, improving our health, changing the actual things we do.
And those things, there’s no substitute for them.
But so much also goes into what’s going on in our own minds, that we can almost program ourselves to look at the world that we choose is best.
And I like to think of it as creating our own paradise.
Really, heaven and hell, paradise and some kind of nightmare, are created inside our own minds, through a way of looking at what’s around us.
So we think paradise, a tropical beach, with a carefree life on the beach: but then the reality of a lot of those places is a lot of very difficult things going on that is not like paradise at all.
And meanwhile, in our apparently drab-looking, simple, everyday, mundane home, we can have a state of mind that takes us to the height of satisfaction and happiness.
So the basic idea is that really, we do have this ability to program ourselves in that way through changing our mindset, and that’s what this series is about: a bunch of different ways of looking at mindset and how we can find different ways of interpreting what’s going on around us and inside our own minds.
The next idea is looking at the whole notion of happiness.
OK, so we want to be happy.
So what’s that all about? Well, happiness, the whole idea of chasing happiness, needing to be happy, being unhappy that we’re not happy: all of that seems to be a great way to produce unhappiness.
Too much focus on happiness leads to unhappiness.
Instead, we can accept that happiness and unhappiness are like weather.
We just see them coming and going.
Not trying to hold on to that happiness when it comes, but just letting it come and go, while taking care of the fundamentals that we believe will most likely lead to future happiness.
By not chasing it directly, instead doing things that tend to lead to happiness, we can then usually get better happiness overall than this endlessly chasing happiness just like trying to dig water.
And so changing the way we look at happiness can be a step towards finding that happy state of mind.
Then there’s the idea of perfection, our ideals, and living up to them.
And I think we all know, at least in principle, that we can’t be perfect, but it does seem like it’s sometimes hard to let go of that idea of perfection.
What are our ideals at all, anyway? Are they really something that come from inside us, that really fit for us, or are we kind of internalizing the ideals that we get from outside, that we think we should be living up to some ideal, because that’s what we do, and we kind of absorb that from what we think is expected of us, but maybe it’s not really what we need.
The whole idea of having our own frame, running our life within our own frame rather than being part of somebody else’s concept.
Then when it comes to mindset, one of the basic things that seems so powerful is gratitude.
It’s such an old cliche about how having this grateful attitude is good.
But yet it seems to work every time.
There’s such an ability to improve our state of mind by simply having gratitude for the things that are good, the things that we have, no matter what might be wrong, the many things we have that are good.
And for example, one is simply to have normal health.
To simply have life and a normal level of health, if we have that, is already amazing.
Just something that we don’t usually think about until it’s not there.
So this idea of normal life being amazing: that itself can kind of bring us closer to a paradise state of mind.
#attitude #mindset #stateofmind