Where do we focus? What thoughts do we choose?

I have a lot of happiness in my life already. I have a rich spiritual life, a wife that I love, who loves me and the same goes for friends and family. I’ve also done some serious soul-searching, dealt with a lot of emotional issues and done a lot of inner healing over the past years. And as forty is approaching my body feels healthier than ever. I also know that what is really important, is the spiritual life and the relationship with God and other people. These are aspects of life that don't cost anything and that we always can do things to cultivate further.

So I really have a lot in my material life to be happy about. More than I thought before I wrote it down actually. 

But career-wise I’m not at all where I want to be and my financial situation is a mess. And I've attached undue importance to these things, partially because the world says that you should. I've done this at the expense of being happy and grateful for what I do have and even felt like a failure because of it.

And maybe it is because I don’t focus on all the other good things in my life that these things are a mess. Because maybe my sense of lack drains the energy that I need for fixing my career and causes me to spend money on things that I don’t need.

My initial question for this post was: can pain be turned into something positive? Then I realized that the post was really about something else. But I still believe that we can gain something positive from pain. And this really also has to do with where we focus.

For one, the pain of the temporal can motivate us to turn towards the eternal. Towards God. When the pain of living in the past or the future becomes unbearable, it can help driving us to the only place where we can find release: The present moment.

Mental pain is always alerting us to something. Maybe some attitude needs to change. Or we need to take a look at our habits. I’ve lately become painfully aware that I’ve become a bit too comfortable in my circumstances. I’ve also not taken care of my relations to other people properly.

When we feel pain, we have a choice of whether we want to try and escape it or face it. If we try to escape it, it will wear us down and we will start moving towards apathy. But if we instead face it, it can be a catalyst for growth. “Something isn’t working so I’m going to resign to it and pretend that it isn’t there” and “Something isn’t working so I’m going to do my best to change it” are two completely different mindsets with radically different behaviors attached to them. And just like with where we focus, it all begins with which thoughts we allow to enter our minds.