Life is a mirror

You see in it what you show in it. If you stand before the mirror and make a pleasant face, a pleasant face looks back at you. If you make an unpleasant face, an unpleasant face looks back at you. What comes to you from the mirror from inside the mirror is created by you standing outside.

Because happiness and misery, favorable environment and unfavorable environment, to a large extent depend upon our state of mind, how we look at things. HAPPINESS IS NOT CONTAINED IN THINGS, SITUATIONS OR THE ENVIRONMENT OUTSIDE. Happiness or unhappiness is in how we look at things through our mind. It is therefore, the situation within. It is the state of our mind that makes our happiness or unhappiness.

A traveler once asked a shepherd: "How do you think the weather will be today?" The shepherd answered: "It will be the weather that I like." The traveler asked: "How can you say that, how do you know it will be what you like?" The shepherd explained: "It is like this, sir: knowing that over such things such as the weather I have no control, knowing that I cannot change it, long ago I decided that whatever weather comes I will like it.

And therefore now I am at peace. Instead of always trying to get only that thing that I like, I decided that it is wiser to like whatever thing I get. So, I always like the weather I get."

The key to happiness is inside. Just as a picture does not paint itself, it must be the artist with his brush that paints it. If he dips the brush in green, he cannot expect blue to appear on the canvas: neither should he blame the brush. Whatever color he applies, that will appear to him. So too should this truth to the canvas of our lives: "I am the one who makes my day: I make my own happiness and misery: I can make either darkness or light; from within I create it."

Apply this truth and then see what happens---you will create a masterpiece.