Life is what you make of it. I am fully aware that I haven't had the best luck throughout life, but that doesn't mean I haven't overall had a good life. I have stories for days, and I'm not sure anybody could really call me boring, if they were to classify me as anything. You wouldn't be able to recognize the good without the bad, and I believe you learn more from your bad experiences. You learn strength and perseverance, and often, you learn more about yourself, as long as you are open to the lesson.
I have a couple interesting books currently in my possession: "Only Love is Real" by Brian Weiss, M.D. (thanks, Alice!), and "Enough, Damnit! A Cynic's Guide to Finally Getting What You Want Out of Life," by Karen Salmansohn, and I think both offer interesting perspectives into your outlook on life. What I take away from both of these books is that you essentially determine how your life goes. For instance, if you regularly think negatively, then bad things will regularly happen to you because you are drawn to them because they are familiar. Think of people who complain about all the drama in their lives... Usually, they put themselves in positions that create drama, or they surround themselves with dramatic people.
I think over time, I went from being a hopeless romantic to a cynic to a realist. Tom from (500) Days of Summer totally reminds me of me, lol. I feel that my life experiences have transformed me again and again and I like who I am today. I have become a bit emotionally detached, in a way, but I actually don't think it's a bad thing. I am just not very emotional anymore and it takes me a lot to get upset, cause I've just been through too much to get upset over things that are temporary or don't jeopardize my life as a whole. I am still caring when necessary and good at being empathic (thanks, Stephanie, for teaching me that "empathetic" isn't a real word!) and understanding. Life is a giant pack of lessons and what you take out of it is determined by how open you are to learning those lessons.
Funny how things are taught so different. In anthropology we use the terms empathic and empathetic to connote two ideas. An empathetic person feels your pain because they have had similar experiences whereas an empathic person employs a type of emotional clairvoyance where the people literally share the emotional experience. Sympathic is when you can understand a persons feelings without being made aware of their emotional state. Sympathic and empathic are types of extra sensory cognition.
ReplyDelete