ATTITUDE

2. Life is never smooth. It has its ups and downs. The law of Nature is pleasure followed by pain. It is our attitude to pain which increases or decreases our capacity to bear it. If we accept the law of Nature and train our mind so that pain is a part of living, then its impact on our health and happiness is considerably reduced. Our capacity to bear pain of failure increases multifold.

3. The irony of life is that we are unaware of the fact that we are victims of our attitude. We suffer from our attitude of revenge, rivalry, hate, jealousy, envy and above all compare and contrast. It is also true that we survive by our attitude of compassion, forgiveness, gratitude and love. It is for us to choose our attitude. The issue is : what is attitude! I believe attitude is nothing but our reaction or response to our own thoughts and actions of others. Let us remember that all actions are based on thought – there is nothing like a thoughtless action. Hence, our thoughts determine our attitude. So, let us always remember that good thoughts produce the right attitude and result in happiness. It has been rightly said: ‘write your hurts in sand and carve in stone the benefits you receive’. This sentence is based on the concepts of forgiveness and gratitude – elements of attitude that make life happy. Attitude to accomplish is not only the basis of success, but also happiness.

4. It is me and my mind that determines my attitude to what I think and I do. My reaction to an action or statement made by my spouse, child, friend or foe determines my attitude and my relationship.

5. Our attitude, I repeat, is what determines on how we feel, live and act. Dalai Lama advises that we develop an attitude of acceptance based on gratefulness when he says : `when you practice gratefulness, there is a sense of respect towards others.’

P. P. Wanqchuk says, ‘you smile or you frown or you cry’. How you react to a particular situation is all because of your attitude’. He goes on to add: `Nature has an unfailing habit of siding with the determined and the positive minded. Nature works like a mother’s womb to nurture and give birth to a beautiful life’.

7. To conclude, I am reproducing what I lately read : T he 92-year old, petite, well-poised and proud lady, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with her hair fashionably coiffed and makeup perfectly applied, even though she is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today.

Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary.

After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, she smiled sweetly when told that her room was ready.

As she manoeuvred her walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on her window. “I love it,” she stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.

“Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room…Just wait.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged, it’s how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it. It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice: I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away, just for this time in my life.”

She went on to explain, “Old age is like a bank account, you withdraw from what you’ve put in. So, my advice to you would be to deposit a lot of happiness in the bank account of memories. Thank you for your part in filling my Memory bank. I am still depositing.”

And with a smile, she said: