Our life is a neutral sequence of ideas and events; how we think about life determines our experience of it. So the details of daily living are not the "cause" of our felt experience. Our thinking about them is. We forget that, as the thinkers, we can "color" our thinking about life any way we want. A lunch with someone we used to work with can be a light-hearted sharing of memories, or a depressing rehearsal of things that went wrong. Remembering a failure can generate reflection about lessons learned, or a moment of regret or self-recrimination. We are the "artists" who interpret and color our own life via the gift of thought. Our memories, our moment-to-moment experience, and our plans look different to us in different states of mind. So when we aren't satisfied with how life is going, maybe looking within rather than trying to alter the outside world, would make a big difference.
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