Life is an art gallery. It is made up of masterpieces but also regular, sometimes poor quality drawings, paintings or sculptures. They depict all the subject matters, all kinds of events, all emotions, all thoughts, all the momentums and complete life stories. Life is a full package, but it is also all you get. It comes in varieties and is far from being boring. And yet, it is never fully defined and final in its expression.

Because life is not really a final product. Instead, it is a medium, a tool, a set of unique circumstances and events gifted to you with one simple instruction: make the best out of it and live it.  No more rules, no explanation, nothing else. So, dear human, how do you handle a Gift like that?

Many of us think of life as a struggle. It brings suffering, we say, disappointment, hardship and sadness. Others live their lives somehow effortlessly. They go through life with ease and joy, they may stumble upon an obstacle, but they do not waste much time on it. They solve the problem and continue the journey.

Frequently, when looking at the events and circumstances that both of those groups deal with, one can say that surprisingly, there are rather big similarities in the kind of events people from all walks of life experience. What is drastically different though is the individual approach. So, why is it relevant?

The circumstances are like a static web page. They just are. They exist, appear, come out of the blue with little or no doing on our part.  We walk into them or wake up to them and face them. We also have little power over them, in terms of editing or modifying their content. Someone simply gets sick or loses his job. Someone gets a divorce or gives birth to a baby. These are the so called big life events, bringing quite significant changes. But not all events are of this serious, important caliber. Someone may simply miss the bus or get stuck in the traffic. Little things, but still beyond our control. And humans, like no other species, like control, don’t we?

But there is good news. Yes, we do not have control over the circumstances in our life, but this is exactly where our lack of control ends, as we enter the field of creativity and assigning the meaning. This part is where all the power and control is. Whether we are aware of that or not, this is where we all become master influencers, creators of the meaning, the very artists who shape the work of art into a living masterpiece called life. And we do it with the help of our own mind, which produces endless thoughts and interpretations of the situation we are in. Those thoughts shape our actual reality. Suddenly, the circumstances get pushed into a background and our own thoughts take charge and play the first fiddle. That is how our life becomes a struggle or a pleasant, easy experience. We simply make it this way by deciding on the interpretation.

Most often than not, the process of assigning the meaning is completely unaware. We do not make a conscious decision but rather allow for subconscious programs and models to assign the meaning for us. As adults, we are usually well equipped with a whole system of beliefs that we use on a daily basis to interpret our lives. Whether those belief systems are really true for us, is a completely different story. But we have them, because we got them from mom, dad, our teachers and the society. So we adapted them and we now use them each time when we are trying to make sense out of something.

Meaning. This is the real paint, the brush, the tool of an artist. This is this element that contains the artist’s expression, each single thought, his whole mind. It can be brilliant or terribly wrong. It can be inspiring and empowering or depressing and cruel. Applied to the same event, same set of circumstances, different interpretations produce drastically different outcomes. This is how everything comes down to the meaning. Meaning is the juice, the essence of life and yet we barely make an effort to choose the desired interpretation. We let it happen instead of making it happen. And then, we blame circumstances. After we gave away the power to create and shape our life, we blame this one thing that we cannot control at all. How so?

One life people. We get it as a Gift. Let’s not waste it. Let’s live it. Let’s bring awareness to it, let’s observe our thoughts, learn how our own mind works and what beliefs it uses to help us create our reality. Let’s make decisions. Let’s choose what meaning we want to assign to the circumstances we face in our lives. Let’s become real artists who create true masterpieces.