As I set out to write this week’s post I passed a milestone. It is number 52—a year since I began this exploration. At times that year seemed inexorable and yet it went by all too quickly. I have written before about the quality of time as we subjectively experience it. But my text today is not about time, at least not in the way I have spoken about it before. Rather it is about the way we perceive the events and actions which occur around as we go about our way.

I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking of late about a tendency I share in common with others to react to the universe and what it dishes up. In some ways we are programmed to react as if we have an innate need to classify all things good or bad. We know better, but it is often difficult for us to suggest that events and actions are neither good nor bad, just actions and events. We are the ones who assign them meaning, and based on how we react they often become self-fulfilling prophecies.

I do not mean to suggest that what we feel is unimportant, it is a lens through which we can, learn something about ourselves, if we stand apart for a moment. If we can observe our reaction without accepting it as a final judgement, we can trace it back to its cause. We can learn why it is we feel the way we do, and that is a precious gift we can take away from any experience.

So how do you get started? Well I cannot speak for anyone else but my approach is to acknowledge the feeling I have in the moment and ask myself what it is that causes me to feel good or bad about what is happening. When I first tried this it often led me to yet more feelings—a trail of associations somewhat circular in nature. Something felt bad because things like it in my past felt bad or seemingly led to outcomes that caused pain or some other negative response. On the face of it this kind of circular logic is easy to dismiss and in time I was unsatisfied with leaving things at this conclusion. Wasn’t I the cause? It became increasingly obvious to me that how I reacted brought about whatever emotional reaction I had . Once that link was forged the chain of actions and reactions was set in motion and the ripples of ensuing events and feelings reinforced the very judgement at which I had already arrived.

With this understanding more clearly laid out I tried some thought experiments. I made a conscious effort to pre-determine the character of a day. I would awaken and decide it was to be a fortuitous day. Funny thing—it was. It was an exercise at first to put the events of the day into this perspective—to twist them into a shape I had pre-determined but all I was doing was what I always did—except with conscious awareness that I was playing this trick on myself.

It took some time but I did arrive at a place where I could arrest my immediate feelings and trace them back to root causes—then dismiss any emotional judgement I had assigned to them. My experiments taught me that even if the feelings I was processing at a point in time felt compellingly good or bad their real meaning in my life was determined by what I chose to make of them.

I will confess, though, that there are times when I still respond with judgement, assigning qualities to events in my life without regard to their true nature. I am human and to be human is to accept that we are all works in progress. No matter. When I fall off the wagon it is easy enough to pick myself up and climb back on. I am hardly unemotional, as any of my friends would tell you, But I am far more aware that my emotional response has cause and effect within me and is not destined by some all-powerful force or fate.

Think about how we tend to have these binary responses to what the universe presents. Abundance and scarcity are one of these polar duos that we indulge with meaning. What is too much or too little. An emotional reaction to fear, or the rejection thereof. Neither arises from the actual state of things, but only from our uncertainty about the future—a future which we may or may not ever experience. Still we expend precious moments worrying about or dismissing something which has not yet happened.

Maybe it is a stretch to say that sad and happy have this same duality. I experience loss as sadness, and indeed that is true for many of us. So the loss of a dear friend, as I wrote about last week leads me to feelings of sadness. Paradoxically, perhaps, it also leads me to feelings of happiness; the recollection of time spent enjoying one another's company. And isn’t that what we tend to do to minister to our sadness? We recall happy times. So which is it, sad or happy? Sad, if I peer into a future that has not occurred and contemplate a world in which my friend is no longer at hand, happy if I recall a past where we enjoyed being with one another.

I encourage you to try an experiment of your own. Pick something that makes you inordinately sad or happy—that you see through the lens of good and bad. Ask yourself why you feel what you feel. With that thought in mind ask yourself what would change your feelings? No, we cannot bring back what is lost, but we can live in the moment, and even if we are tempted to peer into the future we can imagine the possibility of one in which we are re-united. The truth is we do not know what lies ahead, “for now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face…..”