
Ever felt overcome by your problems and just wished they would go away? I'm sure we all have. The fact is, problems are problems because they do not go away just by wishing.
The old Indian proverb, "pray with your feet" is apt in this situation... you can wish, pray, complain, bitch all you want... but it is exactly the moment that we decide to get up after being kicked down that we begin to own our problems.
The amazing thing about the body is it's sense of survival. It is the strongest instinct we own, and we often forget this in North America. Survival for most of us gets confused with comfort, as many luxuries we have come to call 'neccessities'.
This disparity dulls our primitive edge; our win at all costs survival hunger that would never let a mortgage bill own every thought we have. This is not to say defaulting on a mortgage or loan payment isn't stressful... just that there is always something we can do.
When we forget our power to change our situation... we give that power to someone who oppresses us, to the ravages of time, to a sickness, etc... this is not to say that people who are sick or have problems chose them. It is to say when you are sick, or when you are hit with obstacles you couldn't have seen coming - you still have a choice!
Making no choice is making a (bad) choice, because you have chosen not to take ownership over your condition and affect whatever change you could have for the better.
Complaining (and doing nothing) acheives nothing - funny, couldn't have called that.
Clawing for everything you get in good times and in bad leads to even small improvements. The rub is- when you add up small improvements in your situation over the course of a lifetime of making good decisions... that is when we separate the 'lucky' from the 'unlucky'.
For the most part, we make our own luck - or we let it be made for us by making no choice. Would you rather roll the dice or roll up your sleeves? The choice seems obvious to at least a few 'lucky' ones out there... maybe we should learn from their example.