“If we limited ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to only our own actions, we would have no call to challenge fate, or to treat others as enemies.” — Marcus Aurelius
A toad and a mouse came upon a puddle of muddy water while they were walking together one summer afternoon.
“Puddles are good,” said the toad. “I can lay in them and cool off on hot days, and that makes me feel happy.”
“Puddles are bad,” said the mouse. “If I fell into it my fur would get wet, and that makes me feel upset.”
But the puddle was not good or bad; it was simply a puddle, regardless of how the toad or the mouse chose to feel about it.
We’re all quick to label stuff around us as “good” or “bad,” just like the toad and mouse in this fable. What we’re really doing, though, is expressing how we feel about those things.
It’s not objects or people or circumstances that upset us, but our judgments and attitudes about those things. What one person chooses to see as upsetting can just as easily be declared pleasant by another. In reality, most things aren’t intrinsically good or bad at all — they just are what they are, regardless of how we might decide to feel about them.
Just like Marcus suggests, try to limit those kinds of labels to what’s totally under your control: your actions, your frame of mind, and your responses to life’s challenges. When you classify externals as “good” or “bad,” you’re just bestowing them with powers they don’t really have.
Everything happens the way it must happen. Events aren’t bad just because they might seem that way to you.
Look at it this way: would you set up a target just so you could miss it? Of course not.
And the universe didn’t set things up the way they are just to miss what it’s aiming for, either.