“A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” – Marcus Aurelius
It is strange how time makes the crooked experiences of our lives straight? With enough time, tragedies of life gain a double purpose. Our relationship changes with them. Sure, no sane person would want to relive them, but they happened and we learn to deal. With a buffer of time and objectivity, we might even be glad we went through it. We know it shaped us. It changed us. We allowed it to make us better.
Is it possible to have a preemptive confidence when life acts as it wishes against us? To not panic, but instead, carefully find the way it makes us better. Life is indifferent to our desires and fate acts as it wishes. To know this might protect us against the frustrations and heartbreaks.
We cannot control what happens, only how we respond. Having a way of viewing our situation helps.
“Take a beat”
Wisdom, I’ve found, is a small pause. That breath we take to assess what’s happening around us. There’s little in life that’s so urgent it doesn’t lend us a moment of reflection. When we root ourselves in introspection, connecting to a deeper sense of virtue and goodness, we equip ourselves to make wiser choices. In those moments of pause, we can find the clarity to respond from a place of strength, rather than fear or impulse.
Matt simon blog 