Perception changes experience

It’s amazing to me that sometimes I can wait in a long line and feel so impatient and annoyed, and other times I can stand in a long line and feel totally content, patient, and grateful. Nothing physical changes. Only my mindset changes, and through it, my entire experience changes. 

I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He shares a thought in that book that I’ve been thinking about since I read it. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”

I wrote around the edges of this idea last week in a post called “Professionals vs Dreamers.” It’s not the lack of pain that dictates the experience. It’s the mindset surrounding the pain that creates the experience. Everything we experience, we experience through the lenses of emotion and perception. There are very few objective facts when it comes to human emotion and experience. 

I really don’t want to end this blog by saying “we just need to have a better attitude,” but that’s kind of what this all boils down to. If our perception of an experience can change the experience greatly, then why wouldn’t we try to optimize our attitude to have as good of a time as we can?