Do you have a picture of how your life should be?
Does it hang on your wall and do you look at it every day?
And if you do, how does it make you feel?
Sometimes, if we are to be happy, we need a new picture of our lives.
Sometimes we discover we’ve framed and varnished a vision of our lives that doesn’t relate to reality.
It is wishful thinking, at best; and means that we only ever experience disappointment, anxiety or despair, because our real life does not match the picture.
The picture offers a dream. But the dream is unobtainable, so our life is judged, constantly.
‘This is how I want it to be! But my life isn’t like that. So everything’s bad. I am bad.’
With only this one picture to look at, nothing is good, everything could be better…and there is neither joy nor peace.
We are framing our lives in unhelpful and unreal ways…until we decide to re-frame things.
And so we do.
If we have an old picture that we no longer like or one that doesn’t fit the décor of the room – we remove it. We take it down and replace it with another picture.
And so with our life picture.
To find joy, we may need to let go of old ways of framing our life and find new images – images more closely related to reality.
Reality is sometimes difficult, but it is also full of joy; something our old framing, an act of the desperate imagination, could never give us.
How do you frame your life today? Does the picture on your wall bring joy – or despair?
If it doesn’t make you happy, it may be time for change
