Trick of the mind
For a brief period of my life I thought I was jinxed. Nothing appeared to be working. It seemed like for every small success I had, there were three huge failings just waiting for me by the corner. I was becoming frustrated. I considered going for deliverance; perhaps there were some wicked evil forces that were intensely at work against me. But suddenly, unexpectedly, a little idea dropped into my mind. I brought out a piece of paper and made a table on it. On one side of the table I wrote Good Days and on the other side of the table I wrote Bad Days. At the end of every day I made a tick under any of the two categories, depending on how that day went. For the days that could not be classified under Good or Bad I put them under 'Good'; the fact I was alive and well was justification for that. The result after two weeks was shocking. There were eleven ticks under Good days and just three under Bad days.
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So I sat down and pondered, if I was having so many good days and so few bad days, how come my life feltmiserable? Why was I so easily depressed and dejected? Why was I feeling like nothing was working for me when, obviously, things were working? And then I heard a single phrase, Trick of the Mind. Our minds at times play tricks on us. Most times it finds it easier to remember our failings than our successes. It finds it so easy to bring our failures to the forefront, while relegating our victories; it is so quick at comparison, comparing the perceived successes of other people with our own inadequacies. At the end the individual is left depressed and dissatisfied with himself. I remembered the worrisome recurrent cases of celebrity suicides. These are people everyone else wants to be like; we admire them, we envy them, we wish for a tiny piece of the good luck that they are enjoying. They appear to be living the good life, but all of a sudden, the news of their death, by their own hands hit us. And we are left wondering; why would he/she do that? We would later discover that just a certain section of their lives wasnt working fine. So we then ask; if his marriage wasnt going well, why couldnt he be grateful for the money that he still had, for the fans and the friends, for the respect and admiration that millions of people had for him? If his finances werent well, why couldnt he remember, and be grateful, for his wonderful family, his impeccable health, his holiday resort in the Bahamas or his yearly trips to Paris? Surely not everyone in the world can afford those wonderful luxuries. But his mind kept emphasizing the single aspect of his life that wasnt working well, and magnified disproportionately, such that it overwhelmed and overshadowed the aspects that were working perfectly; a trick of the mind.
The timeless church hymn Count your Blessings just made more sense to me than ever before; "when you are discouraged thinking all is lost, count your many blessings name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done". This was the reason I was surprised after I made my Good day/Bad day table. If we can only take the time out to physically count our blessings, our successes, our victories, we will find more reason to smile, to laugh, to be grateful, to rejoice, and we would not allow our minds to play devious tricks on us.
It is not only a trick of the mind, but also the mindset of the average human being. We accept all the good things in life, as if is our right. Not as a privilege. And then we regard the few mishaps, as undeserved, and tend to have a disgust against our fellow humans. Even against God. How could life do this to us? The fact is: we tend to overshadow our fortunes, with the few misfortunes. Because we are selfish. And because we think that we are our own architects of success, but that only other factors are responsible for our own mistakes and loss of direction
