In 1984, 20 years old Jerry White and two friends went camping in the Golan Heights in Israel. During hiking, White stepped on a landmine, which blew away his left leg and mangled his right. White spent next one year in recovery and rehabilitation in an Israeli hospital.
White struggled with anger and depression following the accident. During his recovery, a man who had also lost his leg in a minefield in Lebanon visited him in the hospital. He asked White to identify which leg he had lost. Due to the effectiveness of the man’s prosthetic leg, White could not do so. “What you have is a nose-bleed,” he told White, “you’ll get over it. The challenge is in your head and your heart, not your leg”. With help from peers and a support network, White gradually changed focus of his thoughts from anger to how he was in a unique situation to help others in similar situations. White co-founded the Landmine Survivors Network in 1995, an organization dedicated to helping landmine victims rebuild their lives. He reframed his suffering as a unique opportunity to advocate for the removal of landmines and support for survivors. For his work, White received the Nobel peace prize in 1997, just 13 years after that fateful day in Golan Heights.
Pain and suffering are as much part of being human as love and compassion. But how we interpret and think about the unfortunate events in our lives can cause the suffering to multiply and last for much longer than the actual event.
Consider another example – It’s Sunday night and you are watching a funny movie with your family after dinner. Everyone is laughing and the air is light with happiness. But then you start thinking about the job you intensely hate that you will need to go to in the morning. Suddenly your reality shifts even though you are all in the exact same physical environment experiencing exact same event (the fun movie with family). While others are happily enjoying the evening, you became stressed and unhappy with just one thought. That’s the power of a thought.
We live in our world of thought and our perception of reality is created from the inside out through our own thinking. The root cause of our suffering is our own thinking… I am not saying that this is all in our head and that it isn’t real. Our perception of reality is very real. We will feel what we think and our feelings are real. That is completely undeniable. However, our thinking will look like an inevitable, unchangeable reality to us until we begin seeing how our reality is created. If we know that we can only ever feel what we are thinking, then we know that we can change our feelings by changing our thinking.
Thus, we can change our experience of life by knowing that it comes from our own thinking.
Joseph Nguyen in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think
To change our thoughts, we have to learn to think about thinking, i.e., thinking2 requires us to get out of our head and be a dispassionate observer of our own thoughts. You watch each thought as it forms, and once fully formed, you examine it with curiosity, but no judgement. And you assess how that particular thought is impacting your reality.
It seems improbable, but we are often one thought away from transforming our experience of life. The moment we can observe our own thinking and stop it in its tracks if it’s not serving us, our happiness begins. The interpretation that you assign to everything that is happening around you is up to you, if you can master thinking about thinking.
