Your Choice or Your Reaction

You understand that every morning you wake up and make choices or react to everything that happens to you that day? You understand that, right? Life is a choice. Even reaction is a choice, just not usually a good one. You choose to be in a good mood or a bad mood. You learn from mistakes, or repeat them. You are a victim or a fighter. You have the power to  discourage a child, or inspire that child. You can be a winner or a loser, and guess what? You are right, either way. 

Life is choices. When you un-clutter the distraction and fear surrounding yourself, every situation presents itself as a choice. You embrace the situation and make lemonade out of lemons, or you react to the sourness. Bad news, annoying people, financial frustrations, and/or more annoying people: it’s a choice that you will make, and how you will react. I am not saying that you have to take a Pollyanna view of the world, just that you don’t need to be pulled under and almost drowned by it.

Choose to embrace the world, not complain about it. Be grateful that you are alive: you could be dying: in pain, without medication, alone, in a cold room, with a Force 5 hurricane coming in over the water. That attitude of being defeated, of bitterly complaining, of feeling that you have no choice because you react to an environment instead of creating your environment? That attitude? It will shorten your life. All those negative emotions of reacting to life and feeling that you have no control, instead of choosing your attitude will play havoc with your hormones, digestion, lungs, heart, circulation, lymph system.

Don’t worry, be happy isn’t so stupid after all. Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

Choose, don’t react. Lead, don’t follow.

That’s Aging Intelligently.