FOCUS and ATTITUDE

Have you ever heard the saying,” What you focus on is what you get?”
How true that is!  When we focus on what we have that is good and wondrous, we experience a good and whole life. When we focus on what is wrong and lacking, we live lives of dissatisfaction and yearning.
So, the good news and the bad news is the same. We are at choice about how we experience life. When you create an atmosphere of never having enough, you will experience deprivation. When the focus is on gratitude, it seems there is “enough”. As Norman Vincent Peale said, “Change your thoughts and change your world.”
A book that had a tremendous impact on my perspective in life was Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl, M.D., Ph.D.  Frankl 3 spent years in concentration camps during WWII. He was a psychiatrist whose research was seized and destroyed, his life’s work.
He spent his3 years in Auschwitz as a time of observation of how people coped, what characteristics those who survived had compared with those who did not survive.
In this book, Frankl writes that values were still extremely important to the individuals. Without them the person in the concentration camp lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, a person with inner freedom and personal value. At that point the person descended to the level of animal life.
As Nietzsche says, “ He who has a WHY to live, can bear almost any HOW.”
Being grateful for even the smallest mercies gave some relief to the suffering. For example, being grateful that they were able, on certain nights, to delouse their heads without the lights going off.
Frankl wrote that to the extent that a person commits to the fulfillment of their life’s meaning, they also actualize themselves. They find meaning through doing a good deed; experiencing the manifestation of a value like love, work with nature.
He finds that if people found meaning in suffering, they could find it in life. Suffering can be ennobling. The prisoners chose to be “worthy of their suffering”, to rise above their outward fate.
He found that mental health is based upon a tension between what one has achieved and what one still wants to accomplish; or the gap between what one is and what one wants tot become.
He realized that we should not hesitate to challenge someone with a potential meaning for them to fulfill. And those choices are always available to us. Van Goethe said, “when we treat a man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.”
Frankl discovered that the sort of person the prisoner became was a result of an INNER DECISION, not camp influences alone.
So, any person, under any circumstances, decides what shall become of them mentally and spiritually. Or, as he stated, "The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself is on the way to the cure.”
People do not simply exist, but decide what their existence will be; what they will become in the next moment. Humans have the potential to behave like saints or animals. Which one is actualized depends not on conditions, but on decisions, on choices made.
What we are left with after “life happens” is what we choose to create from the reality of the situation. Will it be about learning, about finding a deeper well of happiness that has more to do with our values, with our outlook, with our realization of what is truly important to us, or will we get snagged in the “when….then” thinking that holds us up.
It is a new year. We do not know at all what is going to happen in this year, much less in the next few moments. What we can develop now however is the awareness that we are at choice about what we do with it all.
As Frankl says in his book, “What alone remains is the last of human freedoms-the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”

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