“I can be changed by what happens to me but I refuse to be reduced by it,” Maya Angelou.  We make choices all the time and we can choose to allow situations to break us or build us.  We need to keep perspective that when we experience something in life, we are also creating that experience.  Our choices take us down certain paths and how we respond to those opportunities is entirely up to us—we create the garden in our mind so we can either see something filled with possibilities and blooms or we see something filled with fear and anxiety about how it will turn out, how it will look.  The goal of the universe is never about how it looks—it is beautiful in its own right and it doesn’t seek validation from us in order to be beautiful or to know it’s beautiful.  The same is true with us: it isn’t about how things look, it’s about what we make of it. 

Stating the obvious, but terrible things happen in this world all the time—we all experience varying degrees of loss and tragedy and we all have to learn how to cope with those experiences.  Then we have things happening on a global scale. We can take situations we have no control over and become the victim in it or we can learn to take what we experience and turn it into something that serves.  Just because things happen a certain way doesn’t mean we have to turn it into a life sentence.  Sometimes we are meant to learn about the power we have to take a crappy situation and make it beautiful.  It’s easy to feel powerless and scared or like there is no hope when we are constantly exposed to what’s going wrong in this world.  But we have the option to make things right and make them beautiful and continue on. 

We can allow the course of this world to change us and shift our direction, but we don’t have to make it make us feel less.  We aren’t diminished in who we are if things don’t go our way or if we have some particularly difficult moment etched in our memory.  Those moments don’t define who we are but those moments often show us who we are.  They show us what we are made of and what we are capable of.  We don’t have to be struck down and feel hopeless in who we are and what our options are just because something unexpected happens.  We get to choose what that means to us and we decide who we are.  The events that unfold in our lives can change who we are, but we decide hat that means.