Circumstances – a word you often use to describe or justify your situation.
You attribute it to things beyond your control.
If that’s the case then you are a creature of circumstances in that they control you and not vice versa.
If you look at the current circumstances in your life you’ll find many are a result of the habits and choices you’ve made over the years.
Many are a result of other people’s choices and decisions but how they affect you is again your decision.
For example; you might’ve had a bad experience with a dog chasing you when you were young. This created a fear which made you decide never to trust dogs again.
Dogs sense this fear in you and reinforce this by being curious or reacting to you. As a result, you avoid dogs and refuse to keep them as pets.
It makes your social life difficult as you battle to visit friends who have dogs or go to beaches where dogs are free. You may even avoid certain streets because of aggressive dogs.
The circumstance that you were faced with made you a slave and your habit has created a set of different circumstances.
Many of us react to different circumstances by saying that they were out of our control. True, there are a number of things that you had no control over such as who your parents were, your physical features and handicaps but it’s not the circumstances that should be moulding you. Rather you should be the one who changes the conditions that surround you.
We are all given a set of chances, opportunities and senses. We have the ability to reason and determine whether we’ll accept the situation or change it.
Why is it that some who are faced with huge difficulties make good? They change their lives and that of other people. The names of Helen Keller, and Gandhi come to mind.
The majority of circumstances in your life are a result of your choices and decisions.
Nobody forced this upon you. If you are honest and take time to seek the root cause of why you are in your situation, you’ll find that you made a choice or decision that led to it. However, I believe that habits have a large role to play in the circumstances we create. They will enforce your beliefs and you will find it difficult to change. I believe that habits and circumstances are entwined to helping the other.
So many of us accept the status quo and refuse to go against the flow. Looking at the world around me I see that dictatorships of decades have been toppled when people said they would never change.
Why? A spark of hope? Or was it just someone who’d had enough and did something about it?
On the other hand, so many of us use circumstances to justify why we’re the way we are. It’s far easier to blame something or someone else for our failures than to look at ourselves.
Have you become a creature of habit allowing your comfort zone and circumstance to be your master?
Did you create the situation which now controls the way you do things and ultimately the way you think?
So the choice is yours but I’d rather be the creator of circumstances that I want than be a creature to situations that cause me pain and hardship.
Love, peace and joy. Isn’t that what we all seek?
We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge and rule our lives from within.
Earl Nightingale
Updated: May 2022