Thinking Things are Good

A patient today told me that everyone is wanting to be a victim of circumstances, rather than realizing that they make their own conditions with their thoughts. I've had that sort of thinking many times. He was a very succesful business man. But I've seen a lot of people who just don't have that kind of opportunity. They don't have the ability to think that well. So they can't see that their reality is created by their perceptions. There is no alternative for them other than to be the "victim" of what happens. However, the notion that we create our lives is very limited. It fails to respect that there is a process that occurs over which we are powerless. That we just get to observe. Things happen. Then, we have to try to figure out (if we can) why they're good. It's harder in some jobs than others. It's hard in medicine. Why did my patient's wife get pancreatic cancer? How is that good? Why do I have a patient who keeps on getting shingles every four months? How is that good?
It's important to know that if I can't figure out why something is good that it's me: I can't figure it out. I'm not smart enough. That's different than deciding that the thing is bad. I'm not smart enough to know what's bad and what's good. So arbitrarily, everything is good. That's not to say that everything is all good all of the time. It's just that everything (the whole thing, not every single thing) is good. In that decision we create our reality to some extent.
Anyway, I saw that patient today. Then I saw a patient who is in her early thirties and has disabling Lupus. She's been my patient for about ten years. She's just sort of declining both physically and spiritually. And then I saw my ALS patient who can't move his arms and can very barely walk at all. And I saw my patient with post-traumatic spinal cord injury who is in a wheelchair. It's hard to help them with that sort of positive thinking. You can't just be a polyanna with the patients all of the time, because that's annoying. Sometimes it's important to acknowledge that things just don't seem fair. They don't seem right sometimes.