“You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.” – Seneca

There is a commonly used saying that breaks down to basically encouraging us to build lives we don’t feel the need to take vacations to get away from. There is something to be said for that. As we are typically the source of almost all of our problems – mostly because we fail to control the things we can control because we are focused on trying to control things we actually have no control over – we fail to see that when we try to escape from the troubles of our lives, we take the source of the problem with us.

Because everywhere we travel to, we are forced to take ourselves along. We’d be better off not taking vacations, not finding new jobs, not moving away at all, until we can look at ourselves and tell ourselves honestly that we are doing a decent job controlling the things we can control and letting go of the things we can not control.

We are likely to find that if we spend just a little time everyday taking a mental inventory and assessing how we are doing at controlling the things we can and letting of of the things we can not, we won’t feel as though we need a break from our lives. Instead we may find ourselves feeling invigorated to get out there and trying to get just a little better at doing what we can to improve our own situation in the ways that we can. At the very least, we will recognize that we control our perspective and therefore our own happiness. And if we can control our own happiness, we have nothing to escape from and nowhere to escape to.

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