How we react is more important that what happened (Now More Than Ever)

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it

You are wholly responsible for your own reactions. If you're angry and you start shouting, you've made that choice. If you say something cruel in the heat of the moment, you made that choice. If you get defensive when someone criticises you, you've made that choice. If what happens to you is bad and you find the good then, of course, you did that.

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Nostalgia helps identify important connections and chose the life narrative that defines us.

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Often nostalgia is connected to missing someone or something. It is a powerful memory because we absorbed the emotion of the event at the time it happened, and it affected us deeply. We carry the feelings of the emotion with us and each time we look back we find those feelings.

Nostalgic feelings help us understand ourselves because life is best understood looking backwards. We re-invent ourselves when we re-look at our past and the events that happened and it is those events that evoke strong feelings that we find first and become our life plot points when we look back.

Each time I think back over my life story, I rethink what happened and draw new conclusions. “How you arrange the plot points of your life into narrative shapes who you are and is a fundamental part of being human.” This is the subtitle in an interesting article titled Life’s Stories, published in The Atlantic in 2015. In that article, Monisha Pasupathi, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Utah, offered much insight on this subject. She stated: “In order to have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story.”

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Soren Kierkegaard

Source: https://connectedeventsmatter.com/findhapp...

To understand where were going and why look back


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I think our life will seem very different when we reach the end and look back.  All that we have explored, learned, and have done, will change us. Will we even recognize our beginning self?

We will see the whole of our life very differently than we did as we experienced the parts. The beginning, the journey, and all of the related circumstances to the journey will be clear, for the first time.

It will be the first time we see the past through the prism of all our experiences and that knowledge will let us know what really happened.

I have always loved this quote by T.S. Eliot: 

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know  the place for the first time".

Soren Kierkegaard seemed to be saying this when he said:

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

In the Essay Section of this website I wrote an article titled Reflections on Life . In that article I said:

"There is no one whose story I am as familiar with as my own. The same is true for you. This seems so obvious, but then what surprises me a little is how I see that story differently almost every time I tell it". It really is different when you look back."

Our conclusions change because we see through the filter of experience.