Are you living a tragedy?

I recently went through an amazing  course on the Power of Prayer and Meditation and through that experience really saw some of the patterns I was playing out.  One of the biggest things I learned was how everything, literally, everything in our life is a mirror.  I knew that before, but really got to see it in action.  Because of this, I have been super aware of the thoughts and feelings I have when I am interacting with others.

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I was recently talking to a very close friend of mine and listening to her talk about her life.  She floated quickly from one topic to another, all with the current theme of something going wrong, someone doing her wrong, and all the tries and failures.  She was upbeat about the next step, but I saw in her something that at the time I could not quite put my finger on.  Later, when I was thinking about the stuff she said, and the people she talked about it, it hit me!  Her life is a tragedy.  Her life has been one misfortune, one misstep, one mistreatment after another.  And, while her attitude is definitely one of surviving and picking herself up, the underlying theme is about the wrong that had been done and her ability to overcome it.  I realized I was feeling sad when talking to her and now I understand why.  When you read a good tragedy, you wince at the uncomfortable parts, and in the end, you are left feeling a bit sad.  Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, MacBeth - in all of them you feel a bit sad at the end.

I started to think about my own life.  And, I started to see that I often talk about my life as a tragedy.  The missed chances, the opportunities that I was not brave enough to take, the mistreatment I have had to overcome and I felt a little ill.  My life is NOT a tragedy!  Nor, do I want to have any energy or underlying energy of my life being a tragedy.  I can see all the blessings and the good in my life, but yet, I too can see an underlying theme of things gone wrong and more importantly people who have done my wrong.  I have forgiven them, but I have not released the energy associated with the events that makes them seem tragic still.  I then started thinking about a lot of other people I know.  And, so many of them have tragedy stories, the ones they are trying desperately to overcome but somehow, no matter how they try, this underlying theme of "I am overcoming a tragedy" remains.  And, I thought of people like my parents and many of their generation as well as others I have met.  They have truly tragic events in their life.  Both my parents lost their Dad at a very young age, for my Dad, this meant becoming the "Man of the Household" as an adolescent and having to deal with lots of adversity with people trying to take advantage of the fact that his Dad was no longer around.  And, yet, these folks don't see their life as a tragedy at all.  And, I kind of want to clue them it that it is, but they don't have that perspective.  In fact, they are grateful. They are content.  They are happy.  They do not see their life as a tragedy.