| I've been thinking lately about fate and what I've thought it's meant in the past and what I think it means now. I used to have this grand belief that whatever happens for a reason and things will always work out for the best. I still believe that, but I think that an untempered belief in it can be dangerous. Things do happen for a reason, and there is a great scheme to everything that we usually have no idea about, but giving complete credence to a concept like that can sometimes give us external justification for things we control ourselves. You have to put yourself in a position for fate to work. You can't just sit in your bedroom and wait for things that are supposed to happen to arrive. You have to take an active role in the universe. At the risk of sounding like a tree-hugger, you have to get out there and allow yourself to be consumed by all the cosmic forces that make up everyday life. Of course, there will be negative stretches and the like where things you don't necessarily like happen to you. But they'll only open your eyes to be able to appreciate the good times when they come. The key is how you spin it to yourself. And that gets me to the heart of what I'm talking about here: perception is reality. What's true in our minds is true. No matter what 2 miillion other people tell you. You alone control how you react to whatever comes up in your life, and those reactions are what make up 90% of your adult life. Shit happens and good people get walked on all the time. What separates the ones who eventually get past it and the ones who don't is how they react to whatever the event was that sent them spinning. If there's a problem, solve it. If it's out of your hands and you really have no control over it, then what good is stressing about it going to do? All we can do as people is worry about what we have the ability to control. And one of those things is our perception. In the past I've always been an pessimist hiding behind the term 'realist'. And now I'm seeing that that way of thinking isn't necessarily healthy. It is, ironically, safer because you're always ready for the other shoe to drop. But that's no way to live. And it really got me down in the past, to the point where I've concocted this identity as 'The Rainking' because it was always just a matter of time before I lost. Well that may have served its purpose, but I'm growing up and realizing that that state of mind kept me from really letting people in. And that's truly tragic. I cannot change my past. All I can do is concentrate on the future and make an attempt to live my life by the basic priniciples I always said I wanted to live by. Whatever happens happens, all I want to do is better control my reactions to it and therefore keep an active role within whatever forces fate chooses to throw my way. |