#482 – How are your words shaping your happiness?

When you communicate your reality, your words aren't neutral: "there are no neutral thoughts," ACIM says. They position you in your reality, making you choose an angle, the lens that colors your experience.

This morning, remembering my time as an Adjunct Associate Professor at CUNY, back in 2017, I wrote about the graduation ceremony I participated in. There I was, on the stage at Madison Square Garden (my dad, a Sinatra fan, would've been so proud of me), with my fellow faculty members, while the students walked and grinned, fresh diploma in hand.

I wanted to write what the experience had meant for me and I stumbled at "It was such a [...] experience." Great? Yeah, but too vague. Beautiful? No, not that.

In 2020, I vowed to avoid "evaluative" language as much as possible. Why? Because it implies judgment. And judgment implies selective––not radical––acceptance. Some things I like and therefore, I accept; some things I don't.

But it's so much easier to say, "It was such a beautiful experience" than to look for the real impact the experience had on me. What it did to me, how it changed me.

I didn't give up and finally landed on "elevating." That was it! The experience elevated me. Not in an arrogant, I'm-better than-you type of way. But in a life-is-unbelievable type of way. Who could ask for anything more?

By refusing to evaluate––beautiful, ugly, boring, fascinating––I found gratitude.

When you stop evaluating your experience through your words, you just live. And isn't life just a wild adventure?

What can you be grateful for, once you stop assessing life?

Love,

Carolina