The other side

For six days you have been doing. Today someone asks what story you've been telling yourself while you did it.

"Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change." Wayne Dyer said it so often it became his, and it is the kindest sentence in this first week.

In 1976 Dyer, a therapist and professor in New York, wrote Your Erroneous Zones, a book his publisher wouldn't promote, so he loaded his car with copies and drove across the country selling it to bookstores and radio stations one town at a time. It became one of the best-selling books of the century. His subject was the habits of mind that waste a life. Guilt, which spends the present being stuck in the past. Worry, which spends the present being stuck in the future. Needing approval, which hands the wheel to whoever is in the room. Blaming, which hands it to whoever isn't.

His test for every feeling was simple. Is this feeling helping me do anything? If not, it is a trap, and traps can be left.

The deeper idea is this. The facts of your week do not move. The story you tell about them does, and the story is the only part that was ever yours. Someone cut you off. Someone didn't call back. The meeting went badly. Now describe the same facts as if they had happened to a person you admire. Watch what changes. Nothing in the world, and everything in you.

That is not positive thinking. I don't like positive thinking much. It is ownership. This month asks what part of you is yours, and the answer today is: your interpretation, every time, even when the event was not.

We go deeper into the thinking traps in the third month. This week you only need to catch one.