While You Can’t Control How People Treat You, You Can Control How You React
How others act is their problem, how you react is yours.
“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.” — Wayne Dyer
Today, you will go out into the world and meet other people. Some will be nice. Some will be not-so-nice. Some might even be just plain terrible.
That’s not a problem. The real matter, as you face the world and all of its varied sorts of people, is how you react to these stimuli — especially when they aren’t pleasant.
Half of the battle is simply realizing, and accepting, that not everyone you meet will be decent. Marcus Aurelius, the great stoic philosopher and the last of the Five Good Emperors, told it to himself this way:
“The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the nature of blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.”
