You are what you think about
By T.G.L. Iyer

A WISE doctor once told me "The quality of your life is determined solely by the relationship you have to your own thinking". He illustrated this point further. He had a woman patient who had lung cancer. He knew that she had very little time to live but he encouraged her by saying"You never know how God controls time. He can shorten and lengthen life at his will and pleasure". But the woman always worried about her coming death. She was spending virtually all her available energy thinking about it discussing about it, worrying about it and dying about it.

The doctor said to her "Do you think it would be possible to spend less time dying and more time living?". Naturally, the patient was offended and she retorted "How could you be insensitive and casual about death?". But when she saw the spirit of the statement the doctor made, she said quietly "You are right. I have been busy dying that I completely forgot to live". After about four days the woman died but before dying she confessed to the doctor "I have lived more these four days than all that long span I have lived so far".

We attach conditions to our contentment. The child says "I will be happy only if I get that toy". The father says "My life will be happy only when I get that promotion". The mother says "How can I be happy without that sari which I saw in the showroom draped on that wax model?". The student says "I can never be happy till the examinations are over". Whenever and wherever there is a problem, there are two options. The first option is to solve it; the second option is to ignore it, but we choose a third option i.e. worrying about it and never attempting to do anything about it!

Suppose you are driving your car and you have to attend a meeting within five minutes. You are caught up in a traffic- jam because a tree has fallen across the road. You can’t go forward or backward because you are surrounded by vehicles. What do you do then? Grit your teeth, curse the whole world, clutch your steering wheel or continuously horn in distress?

A friend of mine had an answer. He was an IAS officer (he is still in service!) He was caught in a traffic-jam in Mumbai. There was no possibility of moving within a few hours. He abandoned the car with the driver, went to the nearest telephone booth, telephoned the meeting place saying that he would be an hour late; he caught an autorickshaw, reached the station, boarded a suburban train, detrained at the nearest station and reached the meeting place exactly within an hour. In fact, he was to preside over themeeting!

Even the smallest event can turn into a personal nightmare if you have an unhealthy psychological functioning of your mind. As Norman Cousins says in his book ‘anatomy of an illness’: "When you are caught up in an emotional storm, there could be an increased flow of hydrochloric acid to the stomach through increased adrenal activity producing Corticoids, increasing your blood pressure and a faster heart-beat.

If you don’t allow the stormto sweep through your mind, you can dismiss negative thoughts, clear your mind, appreciate beauty instead of the ugliness of life". So, focus on the positives instead of the negatives and getting into the coils of an emotional storm.

Albert Einstein once said: "The solution to a problem will never come about from the same level of understanding that created the problem in the first place." Dwelling on a problem clouds the issue and you are not able to see the solution clearly. Wisdom is nothing more than seeing the problem in a fresh and different pattern. We can see in the field of education that the same syllabus continues for years.

Unless it is revised, education becomes old information. Similarly, unless life’s syllabus is revised there could be no prosperity but only poverty of the mind!