The way we look at things.

It might be the most important practical teaching I got from the past years studying philosophy: The way we look at things determines the life we have.

As Anais Nin phrased it: We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Indeed, we cannot control all the things that happen to us in life. They are as they are. However, we can choose, with some work on ourselves, how we welcome them, how we react to them.

Of course, life is not simple and there are difficult events for everyone, but this teaching is true for a lot of things.

For simple things like: We don't choose when it rains, but we can choose between being pissed off that we can't go outside in a t-shirt or telling ourselves that it is good because it feeds nature.

It is also true for things that have more impact: We can choose to tell ourselves that we don't have enough, or we can tell ourselves that we are lucky to have what we have. We can choose that something is insignificant, or that it is great. We can tell ourselves that an experience was terrible, or find elements that make it instructive. We can see criticism as something that makes us completely question ourselves and lose our self-confidence, or as an opportunity to improve.

If we see the world negatively and assume that all humans are bad, we are bound to have more negative experiences with the outside world. If we see it in a nuanced way, knowing that there are good people, thinking that there is always hope, we will necessarily have a more positive overall experience in this world.

Some philosophers even apply this principle to very difficult events, which we said before happen to everyone. For some people, death is something terrible, which they are completely afraid of. For others, it is just the end of the cycle of life, which we all share, and perhaps an event as beautiful as a birth.

Epictetus said: "What torments human beings is not reality, but the opinion they have of it."

It is up to everyone to find what suits them, but think about it, we often suffer more in our imagination than in reality, and our happiness, or more generally the life we have, depends a lot on how we look at the things that life offers us.

You can take a step back, analyze how you receive things, and if you wish, work on yourself to change it.