Now You Can Enjoy
Yourself Every Day
"People are often puzzled
by the idea of making life more enjoyable by changing their viewpoints.
Let us examine it:
"Suppose you are not feeling
well one day, yet you accompany some friends on a leisurely drive through
the beautiful countryside. Someone calls your attention to a lovely lake,
but because of your illness, you cannot give it your attention or interest.
Someone else remarks about a magnificent mountain in the distance, but
you hardly hear him. You pass one lovely scene after another, yet they
have no meaning to you. Because your illness has taken all your energy,
you have none to spare in enjoying yourself. It is the same to your mind
as if these natural beauties didn't exist at all. In your present ill state,
they have neither existence nor attraction.
"But the next day you recover.
You feel fine. There is no inward attention to anything; you are outward
bound once more. So again you go on a drive; you visit the very same places.
But now, everything is completely different. You enjoy the lovely lake
and magnificent mountain. You respond to them. You enjoy yourself.
"How come? It was the very
same scenery both times. But on the second trip you were different.
You saw everything in an entirely new way. You had the inner freedom to
see and appreciate your outer world. Like magic, your changed mental viewpoint
changed the world for you.
"It is difficult for people
to grasp that the very same principle holds true elsewhere in life. Yet
it is absolutely so. When we are inwardly ill at ease we do not really
see things as they are; we see them as we are. And there is a world of
difference, an actual world of difference in the two viewpoints.
"As we elevate our mental
view points we also elevate our world. How is this accomplished? Enjoyment
results from discard, not from acquisition. Discard of what? Of the very
things we really want to lose - our acquired negative attitudes.
"Enjoyment of life is not
the presence of something outside ourselves; it is the absence of something
within ourselves. Gloom is a state of inner blockage of your True Self;
enjoyment is its release. Just as a balloon rises to greater heights by
discarding weights, so do we ascend as we toss out negativities."....Vernon
Howard, From Psycho-Pictography
