Mark O. Haroldsen - Investing In Health and Wealth

I noticed that I and a number of other people are having a hard time with life events recently. We will all have difficult times to deal with but how events affect us now and impact us in the long run depends on how we deal with them. If you’ve followed this blog for a while then you’ve probably read my thoughts on living in the now and how it affects your health, stress level, and just enjoyment of life. Well, the same kind of thing is key for dealing with hard times.

When we find ourselves in an emotional or difficult moment–whether it’s a bad injury, a deadline you’ve missed at work, or the loss of a loved one, one of the first things that comes to mind is wanting or wishing you could change the circumstances you find yourself in. There’s no point in doing this but we all do it just the same. If you hold onto those thoughts, you’ll just be torturing yourself which does you and those around you no good at all and can be harmful in the long run.

It’s true that some situations can actually be changed for the better, but, unfortunately, there are a lot of things you can’t change and some things we shouldn’t try to change. Sometimes trying to change the difficult thing we’re dealing with is just going to waste a lot of energy on a losing battle. Sometimes it can make something even worse.

So, the first thing you need to do with any situation is to accept what has already happened. The past cannot be changed. If you missed that deadline, well, you can’t go back and get the work done on time any longer, but you can move forward and get the job done as soon as possible or, if it’s just too late, put it aside and pick up the next most important task. If someone has passed away, celebrate who they were and how they have enriched your life while realizing and accepting that everyone will pass on and that it’s just part of this wonderful miracle of life we have been lucky enough to experience.

Accepting and living in the moment won’t make the stress or pain of what has happened go away completely and that’s okay too. Disappointment, pain, and sorrow are normal when things get rough. It’s an emotional reaction that we don’t choose. But we can choose how long we are going to dwell on it. Those emotions are a reaction to the circumstance, but the initial reaction is momentary.

So, go ahead and feel your emotions and accept them as normal and natural but let go of any attempts to control what has already happened. This will make it so much easier to accept difficult circumstances. When you do, it will reduce the emotional and physical pain and problems you’ll have while dealing with the situation.

That’s what it means to live in the now and accept and appreciate the moments we have, the good and the bad. It’s just not worth spending your precious time wishing things had been different. And it’s not worth your precious energy to try changing the present in an attempt to rewrite the past, no matter how bad an effect it has had on you and your loved ones.

So even though you can’t change the past, you can change the here and now and you can change what happens next. The only thing that can do this and can change how a difficult situation will affect you, is in how you deal with it in the moment you have, that moment of the here and now.