Personal firewall

Imagine you’re sitting in a lounge chair, relaxing at your summer house or a trendy resort. At that moment, an annoying fly starts bothering you. You try to shoo it away, but it keeps coming back. You get angry and feel unhappy. Freeze frame. So, the fly has annoyed you, right? Are you suffering because the fly keeps landing on your sun-kissed skin? No, you’re suffering because you’re getting angry at that fly.

Ask yourself a different question: does this insect have enough strength, intelligence, cunning, deceit, and so on, to make you angry? Your anger is within you. Your unhappiness is within you. Only you are the master of your emotions and the master of your attitude towards the events around you. If the events around you affect your emotional state, then you are a slave to those events. You are dependent on them.

Another example: you are standing at the lights, the green comes on, and the lady in front of you, with every sticker going — “high heel,” “teapot,” “killer,” “70” — cannot get moving. If you think you are the one suffering from every incompetent who has taken to the road, then yes, it is you who is suffering. And you will go on suffering every time you land in situations like this. In reality, though, it is not you who lands in these situations. You create them. All the stress arises inside your own head. You, and your thoughts, are once again dependent on external events.

You need the opposite: for events to depend on you. A person is a being capable of seeing the future, and the feeling of having control over one’s future is a source of happiness. To manage something, you must not be dependent on it. Moreover, as soon as you stop depending on external circumstances, you immediately gain control over them.

All stress is caused by your thoughts, not by people or events. Understand this. Look for the reason for your unhappiness within yourself, in your attitude towards it, in your emotions that dominate you. Your skull is a reliable wall separating the external world from the internal one. Use it, or rather, understand that no matter how much the Wolf huffs and puffs at the stone house of Nuf-Nuf, the piglets have nothing to worry about, even though yes, the wolf is scary. 🙂

Nobody is saying you should have no adequate (not emotional) reaction to external events. But it has to be a reaction that is not caused by the event and that will lead to the result you want. Feel the difference.

Actions of other people, eventsexternalworld, especially negative ones, should not affect yourinternalworld..