WHEN THINGS GO PEARSHAPE, we tend to look outside ourselves for a culprit to blame. But before all the negative emotion sets in and the anger or the tears erupt, we need to stop for a moment and turn the incident around full circle and look at it from the back end.

We may be confronted by an angry person say, or an accident of some sort, a family squabble, or we’re just having a bad day. Usually when anything like this happens to us we blame the outside incident. For instance, the angry person, the other car, the wife, husband, son, daughter, the weather or just plain dumb luck.

We tend to believe that what we experience in life arises from a complicated network of outside causes that we have to negotiate around every day of our lives. We tend to attribute happiness or sadness for example, to single, individual sources.

But if this were so, as soon as we come into contact with what we would consider to be good, we would automatically and immediately become happy and conversely, in the case of bad things, become invariably sad. The cause of our joy or sorrow seems to be easy to identify and target.

We tend to shy away from sorrow and chase after joy. It all seems so simple, thus we believe there is every justification for our anger against events we judge to be ‘not good for us’ and sound reason for our attraction to anything that we deem as pleasurable for us, but it doesn’t work that way.

A new approach is needed if we are to find continuing joy in our life, but how can we achieve that? As we have found, if we continue to blame outside influences for our unhappiness – or even our happiness – we are doomed to a life of chasing after dreams.

Instead we must turn turtle and look in the other direction. We must look within ourselves, for therein lies the answer to all our suffering…

Dan’s Quote: “We always blame others for our trials and tribulations..
_____________Even the self we blame is other than who we truly are.”

Header: Kangaroos at ‘Hillsborough’– ‘Mackay’, Queensland, Australia.