In our modern world we have so many distractions. We have all heard the statement “Out of sight – out of mind”. After I had moved away, a friend of mine stopped communicating. My ego wanted to believe that she really did not like me, or perhaps she had chummed up with one of my “enemies”. The ego will design all kinds of fabrications to make us feel badly. The truth is (probably) my friend is simply too busy with her own life and her own challenges, to stay in touch with me. She is too distracted by those events in her own life, to concern herself with mine.
By the same token, attraction can pull us away from friendships. We have all known women friends who, once they had found a love interest, suddenly had no time for her friends, leaving them alone in the dust. Her new attraction had become a distraction from the people who used to matter in her life. We can take this personally, become angry, jealous, hurt, etc.; blaming our former friend for wrongs we believe she has committed. Or, we can simply be happy for her and grateful for the friendship we had once shared.
If our marriage or partnership has grown stale, we can create distraction from our unhappiness by becoming attracted to another. We can delude ourselves into believing that the marriage was the cause of our unhappiness. In reality, it was our own thoughts that created our misery. What this boils down to, is that we each put our attention on whatever it is that makes us happy, or sustains our ego’s belief system. Sometimes, our misery, in its familiarity, provides us with the most comfort, thus our unhappiness is in a sense, our happiness.
Terry Cole-Whittaker, in her book What You Think of Me is None of My Business, reminds us that our inner atmosphere is not the result of how others have treated us, but our thoughts about that treatment. Our ego wants to make it our business to figure out the motives behind other people’s actions. We can allow ourselves to be distracted by ego, or we can choose where to put our attention, and what we wish to be attracted to. In each moment we can allow ourselves to be attracted by those things which create a sense of peace and well-being, or we can continue to be distracted by those things that will pull us off center from our inner state of joy. This is the game of life. What will you choose in this moment?
