We’re all deeply impacted each time another person goes on a rampage hurting innocent people.
Although few of us are directly affected, we all feel for the victims and their families, and we want answers on how this could have happened again, and again.
Yet it does. And just like the wars, injustices, and human suffering that have forever plagued our species, awful things will keep happening.
The only choice each of us has is what we do about it.
Protect Yourself From Terror
I received many emails on this article I wrote after the terrorist ran down innocent people in a U-Haul close to my home.
That article is about choosing your thoughts to protect your mind from terror, and last week I got more questions about it.
A client said, “But I can’t just tune out these awful things, this really happened.” He’s right, and that’s not my point.
My point is that our brains are addicted to emotional spikes and we’re naturally drawn into such events, which means that we can find ourselves stuck fixating on the worst of the world.
But just because it happens in the world doesn’t mean that we have to turn it into our world.
There’s a fine line between being informed and caring for others, relative to getting our minds sucked into every detail of these situations and making them our “reality.”
What’s The Reality?
As I write this I’m looking into an apartment across the way seeing two little girls sitting around the kitchen table playing a game with their Dad.
Certainly, Dad knows about it, but his reality is that he’s sitting with his little girls. He could make that killer’s reality his, he could even put it on the TV for his little girls to see, or he can keep his mind on what is real in his life, and what he wants it to be.
Tragedies, natural or otherwise, orient our social consciousness towards one horrible event, stealing our attention away from the totality of our world.