Remember that It’s Not the Circumstances, It’s You
We took Samantha and Rosie to Disneyland for the first time a few years ago. Michelle and I hadn’t been there for a long time and being back was a wonderful experience, reminding each of us of our childhood and lots of great memories. The girls loved it and we all had a blast—it was so much fun for us to experience the magic through their eyes.
I was struck, however, by the nature of many of the conversations that I overheard (mostly from other adults) during our trip. There were three primary themes of these conversations. First, people talked about how hot it was. We were there in August and it gets pretty warm in Anaheim, California, at that time of year. Second, people talked about how long the lines were. Again, the crowds tend to be pretty big in summertime at Disneyland. And third, people talked about how expensive it was. It’s true; Disneyland is not cheap.
And this is called “the happiest place on earth”!
While none of these complaints seemed completely ridiculous to me, you would think that in the midst of a “fun” and “exciting” place like Disneyland, people would be happy. But I quickly realized that this wasn’t necessarily the case, and it brought back to mind one of my favorite Ben Franklin quotes: “Joy doesn’t exist in the world, it exists in us.”
The wisdom in Franklin’s quote seems simple on the surface, but it’s quite profound and a complete paradigm shift from how we tend to relate to the circumstances of our lives. Feeling like a victim of the things that happen to us is how we’re taught to live. It’s often encouraged by our culture, the people around us, and our own thoughts.
The circumstances of our lives, especially when they seem stressful or intense, do have an impact on us, for sure. However, all too often we give away our power—acting as though it’s a foregone conclusion that we will feel a certain way based on specific circumstances or situations (e.g., the economy, our health, the weather, our family background, and so on). But our experience of life in any given moment is much more of a reflection of what’s going on within us; it’s not simply a reaction to what’s going on around us.
A poignant and powerful example of this was Randy Pausch. Randy was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In September of 2007, he gave a lecture entitled “How to Achieve Your Childhood Dreams.” It was part of a tradition at Carnegie Mellon called the “Last Lecture.” The idea behind this was that as a professor, if you had one last lecture to give to your students before you died, what would you say? The “elephant in the room,” as Randy talked about in his lecture, was the fact that it wasn’t hypothetical for him because he was actually dying of pancreatic cancer and had been told that he had just months to live.
Randy, a 46-year-old father of three young children, gave his heartfelt, passionate, and inspiring lecture to about 400 people at Carnegie Mellon. Given the circumstances and the power of the lecture, it had a significant impact on everyone in the room. Because some people were not able to attend, the lecture was recorded and posted online internally at the university. Someone then posted it on YouTube, and it went viral. Ten million people watched the video in those first few weeks, and Randy was then invited on The Oprah Winfrey Show to reprise a portion of his lecture, which is where I first heard of him. He went on to write a best-selling book called The Last Lecture and inspired millions of people around the world before he ultimately lost his battle with cancer in July of 2008.
Like so many others, I was deeply touched and moved by Randy, his story, his lecture, his book, and his simple but profound wisdom. Most inspiring of all was how he approached his life, even in the face of difficult circumstances. At one point in the lecture, Randy says, “It’s important to have fun; I’m dying and I’m still choosing to have fun.”
Randy had justifiable reasons to feel sorry for himself, to be angry and depressed, and to feel victimized by his circumstances. However, he chose to approach his life and his death in a very different and inspiring way.
Most of us have had times in our lives when things were going great on the surface or we accomplished or experienced some wonderful external success, only to feel a sense of disappointment or sadness underneath because we didn’t feel satisfied on a deeper level. And, on the other hand, many of us have had moments of incredible joy that weren’t directly connected to anything “worthy” of these feelings externally. My girls have been teaching me about this from the time each of them started walking and talking. Pay attention to young children; it’s amazing how the simple things bring them joy—like the wrapping paper or the box that a gift comes in when they’re too young to even understand the present or holiday being celebrated.
Even though we know this dynamic to be true, we still seem to get caught in the hypnotic, erroneous notion that if we just got rid of some issues, altered some circumstances, manifested some increased success, or changed some specific situations in our lives, then we’d be happy.
Author and teacher Byron Katie says, “The definition of insanity is thinking that you need something you don’t have. The mere fact that you exist right now without that which you think you need is proof that you don’t need it.”
What if we lived our lives with a deeper and more conscious awareness of the fact that we get to create our experience of life at any moment? Imagine what our lives, our careers, and our relationships would look like if we stopped blaming our experience on other people or on external circumstances. We would free up a great deal of positive energy and take back so much of our personal power.
This is about taking 100 percent responsibility for our experience of life. It doesn’t mean that we can control everything, but it does mean that we make a commitment to live life by design, not default. It’s also likely that we’ll forget, slip up, and fall back into victimhood from time to time (or often)—we’ve been trained to live in “victim consciousness,” even though it doesn’t give us what we ultimately want. When we’re conscious, willing, and courageous enough to live as the designers of our lives—we can literally transform our experience of life at any moment. Then, of course, we won’t mind the heat, long lines, and expense of Disneyland (or anywhere else we are), and instead we’ll enjoy the real magic of the experience. It really has less to do with where we are and what’s going on, and more to do with us and what’s happening internally anyway.