“Please understand this: When you value your position in life, when you value your life situations, that is not the same thing as valuing your life. Your varied conditions where you live, how you live, the large or small size of your bank account, the number of friends, acquaintances, activities all these are not your life.
They are happenings that are so numerous and so overwhelming and so demanding that unknown to yourself you have a conversation with yourself, and you carelessly without realizing what you are doing or saying, you tell yourself statements such as the following: ‘My life has had nothing but ill fortune; my life is bumpy; it’s going the wrong way; my life is not turning out the way I hoped it would; in spite of all my efforts, my life is just dull, boring, defeating, and sad.’
I want you to be far more careful with your vocabulary, with your use of words. You can give yourself a great shaft of light that will explain everything to you simply by knowing how you carelessly misuse words, terms, ideas. Now, you have just learned that what you do is not your life. So stop calling it your life. It’s an action. It’s a tragedy. It’s a misfortune. It’s a blow. It’s a sudden in-crease in your financial stature. It is not you. It is not your life.”
– from a talk given 12/28/1988 Vernon Howard’s Higher World
Svaha 