“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.” ~Eckhart Tolle Today I’m going to suggest a small change in mindset that could change your life. I won’t keep you in suspense. Here it is: think of nothing that happens as either good or bad. Stop judging, and stop expecting. It’s a tiny change — all you have to do is say, ‘That wasn’t good or bad, it just happened, it just is.’ It’s tiny, but it takes practice, and amazingly, it can knock you on your ass. Why? Because with this little change, you will no longer be swayed up and down depending on whether good things or bad things happen to you, whether people (and their actions) are good or bad. You will learn to accept things as they are, and move within that landscape mindfully. You will no longer expect good things to happen (or bad things), but will just take things as they come, and be content with whatever comes. This means you’ll no longer be disappointed, or unhappy. “When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad.” ~Lao Tzu A Little Exercise Think of something good that happened to you recently, and how it affected your mindset. Now think of something bad that happened, and what that did to your mindset. Now imagine that neither event was good, and neither was bad. They simply happened, existed. How does that change how you would have felt as a result of those events? How does it change your happiness, your mood? How does it change what you do in reaction? When you stop judging things as good or bad, you are no longer burdened by the emotions of this judgment, and can live lighter, freer. Nothing is good or bad Hamlet said, ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ He was right. Without the human mind, things just happen, and they are not good or bad. It’s only when we apply the filter of our judgment that they become good or bad, beautiful or ugly. A weed is only a weed when we don’t like it. Children are only naughty if we don’t like their actions. Life only sucks if you judge it as bad. But what about truly horrible tragedies, like a plague or tsunami or the Holocaust? Surely those are bad? Sure, through the lens of the judgment we’ve been raised to make, they are terrible. But then again, remove the judgment, and then … they simply happened. Death and cruelty will probably always make us sad, but they’ve always happened and always will, whether we like them or hate them. Holocaust survivor and author Victor Frankl wrote of a rich woman who went through the Holocaust, and who was grateful for the experience, as much as she suffered, because it opened her eyes. It transformed her. I’m not saying the Holocaust was good, but perhaps we can say that it happened. It serves as a lesson — one we should heed, by the way, in these days of politically charged hatred, of blaming our ills on immigrants and minorities. There are other tragedies that happen that aren’t necessarily bad. They’re devastating losses, without a doubt, but in life there are always losses, and people will always die. It’s how we judge them that determines our reaction, and determines whether we’re capable of dealing with it sanely. Great Expectations The second half of this change is just as small, but just as important: dropping expectations. Not lowering expectations, but eliminating them. Think about it: when we have expectations, and things don’t go the way we expect (which happens quite often, as we’re not good prognosticators), we are disappointed, frustrated. It’s our expectations that force us to judge whether something is good or bad. When you expect something of a friend, co-worker, family member, spouse, and they don’t live up to that expectation, then you are upset with th