I remember being told as a child that “you can’t get everything you want in life”. No doubt at the time I was being told this because I wanted a particular toy or treat, or to go to the beach, or the cinema, or somewhere equally alluring.
This notion stuck with me well into adulthood. However, the older I get, the more I think that the truth of this matter may be more subtle than the way it was first presented to me all those years ago.
It may very well be possible to have everything we want in life, or it may not. I don’t know. What seems more certain is that it is unlikely that we will be able to have everything we want all at the same time.
Also, there is the notion of being aware of the things we do have. It is easy to take these for granted. Sometimes we might not realise that something we have is very valuable to us until it is gone. You never miss the water until the well runs dry, and all that. I can think of many such examples from my own life. This may be a part of what gives nostalgia its power: the realisation of what we once had that is now gone.
The difficult truth is that the vast majority of things in life are beyond our control. What happens mostly just, well, happens and there is often very little we can do about it. They are also transient; just about everything in life is in a constant state of change, whether we like it or not.
I once read that if we were to draw up a table with two columns, one listing the things we can control and the other the things we cannot, the first column might contain “our thoughts” and “our actions”. The second column would contain pretty much everything else.
At first glance that may seem a depressing notion, but in some ways it is actually quite liberating. There is so much that we can let go of rather than trying in vain to control it. Looking at things from this viewpoint, we might also consider ourselves fortunate if we want all the things we get in life rather than vice versa.
It’s an interesting little perspective shift that I try to remind myself of on a regular basis. As the saying goes, our attitude is everything.
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