Nothing Has to Go Right For Us to Be Happy-Daily Meditation-July 13, 2021
Today’s quotation:
When we recognize that nothing has to go right for us to be happy, that people do not have to behave for us to love them, our walk home can be surprisingly simple. We have enormous power not to manipulate the world, but to be happy and to know peace. –Hugh Prather
Today’s Meditation:
What do we use our power for? Do we try to manipulate the world, making things turn out how we feel they should turn out (for the good of everyone, of course), trying to make everyone act as we think they ought to act and make everything turn out just so? If we do act this way, guess what? We’re setting ourselves up for failure after failure, for there’s really no way that we can make others act the way we want them to or to make sure that everything will turn out the way we think it should.
We can use our power instead to ensure that we’re doing what we know we ought to do, that we’re behaving as we should, that we’re giving as much as we’re able to the world. We can use our power to spread love and encouragement, and words of hope. We can use our power to be there when others need us. We can use our power to love unconditionally instead of putting conditions on the love we share with others.
We have enormous power to know peace. We have the great power to be happy. But when we use our power to control things that are out of our control, that power is wasted.
Our “walk home” can be straightforward, depending on where we are and what we try to do with the ample power to control our own destinies that we’ve been given. We’re not here to push others in directions in which we think they ought to go–we’re here to be ourselves, live and love, be, and share.
It really is rather simple.
Questions to consider:
What do you use most of your power on?
How might you redirect your power to give yourself more peace and happiness?
Do you try to manipulate the world at all? In what ways (even the tiny ones)?
For further thought:
To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others
bespeaks more lamentable poverty than that of
the person who begs his or her daily bread.
Charles C. Colton
