what comes out is what’s on the inside
Your reaction to anything is the most powerful thing you can control, because it will influence all future events in your life. As Viktor Frankl, a man who survived the worst of the Nazi prison camps, said, “it is the last of the human freedoms to be able to choose how we act in any given situation.” Whatever happens to you, you have the ability to choose how you respond.
Whether you get fired, dumped, lose something, or get cut off in traffic, it’s important to remember that all these events are distinct They often pass as quickly as they happen. The problem is we often can’t let go of the feeling they created. We choose to hold on.
You never die from a snake bite. It happened. You die from the venom. The lasting impact of the event that created it. If you cut yourself, the natural process of the body is to heal. It doesn’t remain open as it would be subject to greater complications. When something happens to us, it is the choice, the holding on to the pain the event caused, not the event itself.
Holding on to the pain we’ve experienced can only manifest in negative emotions. Those negative emotions do not let our “wounds” heal. Instead, they create larger problems by influencing our future decisions. Pretty soon you start to think that it’s not you, but it’s other people, or things that happen to you, that re causing you to feel those negative emotions, but those outside events can’t create those internal feelings. Those feelings come from within. We’ve chosen to react in a certain way, by holding on to the pain we’ve been caused.
What comes out of you is what’s inside of you. Ask yourself the following question — if you squeeze an Orange, what comes out? It’s not a trick question. The only acceptable answer is Orange Juice.
Extend that metaphor to when someone “squeezes” you. Someone says something you don’t like, behaves towards you in a way you find offensive, does or says something that you perceive as hurtful, and out comes anger, bitterness, callousness, fear, hatred, resentment, stress, anxiety, or tension. Immediately, you say that you’re feeling this way because of how someone else acted toward you, or what someone else said, or did, but in reality — what comes out is what’s on the inside.
If we have chosen to hold on to the pain of our past, it will always be there to remind you the next time something similar happens. We have to make a conscious choice to respond to the challenging events in our life in a way that will allow us to heal and be open to the future we wish to have. Don’t let yesterday, take up too much today, because that’s how we build tomorrow.