You're not your season

A bad day becomes a bad week. It’s happened too often, yet it still catches me off guard. Now, the year’s almost over and I’m not nearly where I would’ve liked to be. The chance to make things right was always within reach, yet it slipped right between my fingers, making it almost feel like a part of me wanted to miss the chance. After looking at the numbers, I couldn’t help feeling like a failure and a fraud. With a heavy heart, I took action in search of relief; I escaped into a fantasy world that took my mind off of reality. But I had to return to reality eventually, as I always must, and I felt worse. The clarity of reality after the dust settled was too much, so I escaped again, and the cycle of escapism started once more.

For many of us, bad seasons tend to bring a pessimistically myopic view of the world, where you see only the tree in front of you and become oblivious to the forest behind you (and all the good things you came across), let alone the forest in front of you (and all the possibilities ahead). And if we don’t stop to get a hold of ourselves, it’s really easy to turn a bad day into a bad season, and a bad season into our identity. The way we tend to do this is by magnifying the severity of things; taking a bad thing and making it a bigger deal than it has to be, going from bad to worse.

Fortunately, we don’t have to identify so strongly with those things that don’t serve us. You’re not your mistakes, your feelings, or your thoughts. Likewise, a bad day doesn’t have to become a bad week, a bad week a bad season, and a bad season a bad life. Unless you choose to yield and hand power over to a mistake by making it a big deal, dwelling on it, and choosing to identify with it. And when your mistakes become part of your identity, you start to look a lot like them.

Count your blessings, and take them as granted, not for granted. Be tactical in your labeling. For the bad things, acknowledge them as “needs work”, then make a doable plan to tackle them. For the good, choose to focus on what’s gone well, celebrate it, and make that part of your identity. What you focus on expands. If you want a better outlook on life, devote energy to your inputs, and a better output is certain to come.

The color of what you see comes from the color of the lens.