26 Nov 2025 Life’s not a problem to be solved

Daily Gratitude: When things go in a different direction than you would like or you think they should (I avoided saying “wrong” because that’s an interpretation you put on something. You just may not understand it yet), instead of saying “why” start asking “what”

It shouldn’t be “why me?” or “why did this happen?”. Instead it should be “what am I supposed to learn from this?” And it also helps to ask “what gift is hidden within this?”

If you can start altering how you look at things, they will magically shift in your eyes. It’s not really magic, though. What you see outside of yourself is just a reflection of what’s inside of you and what you are thinking. And you know what? You are in control of what you think and you can change what you think. As you begin to do that changing, you will be surprised that you’re looking at things around you differently.

You can look at things as if they are all bad or mostly bad or maybe just somewhat bad. But what if you decided to try to see everything as good – or to find something good, no matter how tiny in what you’re seeing. Then focus on that tiny thing.

Let’s take a maybe gruesome example. You see a bad car accident. You could focus on the carnage; you could concentrate on the traffic back up; you could think about how lousy a safety rating that car has; you could be sad for the injured people. And so on.

How could you possibly find something good to focus on given that scenario. What if you concentrated on giving thanks for an exceptional first responder system – for the police, the fire rescue folks. The EMTs and paramedics, the people in the hospitals nearby, the modern day communications systems that have enabled quick response and cleanup. Why not concentrate and be grateful that it wasn’t you more or your family members.

Then ask yourself what lesson(s) am i being given? Maybe it’s a driving lesson, maybe it’s something you want to share with your children, maybe it’s that you should pay more attention to gratitude. Who knows. But I guarantee there’s a lesson.

“What is this experience trying to teach me?”