When you think about the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind? Then, if you think it once more, you might probably think about somebody else instead of the first person that you remembered. If you would take about ten minutes to think about this, you might get surprised when you mention another name now, which is quite different instead of the first name that popped up in your head. This is just an experiment of knowing how our response can change over such a short period of time for the same thing even when we are dealing with such a simple question.
This alone should be sufficient to convince us that our first responses towards things might not be the best ones that we might possible give. Different things happen to us, some of which are pleasant and some are things that give us bad feelings. However, these are inevitable parts of our day-to-day life, and we will never get to the point where we will never face any adversity or calamity that might befall upon us. You cannot control the natural death of a close member of your family, nor can you control the weather conditions. However, there is such a thing that you can control: Your response towards these events.
Knowing that these types of things are going to happen no matter how rare or how often, or whether we are expecting them or not, it is important to learn an insight: Our responses are what really matters in the end. Losing a close member of the family might be something which can be inevitable and crying the whole remaining part of our lives would not bring any benefit. We cannot bring him or her back to life, but what we can do is have a positive reaction about this event. Knowing that death can come unexpectedly, we can try to interpret this event as a reminder about the shortness of our lives and how we can make the remaining part of our lives the best part ever. Moreover, we can interpret it as something that is supposed to give us a stimulation of getting closer to each other and valuing the others more than we used to in the past. We can also interpret it as an opportunity to get a better clarity about our life visions, goals and values and resolve to give our best at the things that we can do.
There are also other things that could be treated this way. Our types of interpretations and the meanings that we give to things are what makes a difference between those that overcome the obstacles that they face in comparison to the others who get stuck and blame everything. Making better interpretations about the events that occur to us are a way of taking responsibility about our own lives.
