Who's to Blame?

"We want to hold something or somebody else responsible for our misery, but unless we choose to be responsible, we'll never grow up. There's a story I heard about a construction worker. At lunchtime one day on the job, the worker opened his lunch box and said, "Oh, no, chicken salad again!" The next day he had chicken salad, and he reacted the same way. The same thing happened on the next day after that, and the next. Finally, a co-worker who heard these repeated complaints said, "If you can't stand the chicken salad, why don't you get your wife to make you something else for lunch?" The man replied, "Oh, I'm not married. I make these lunches myself."

There's truth in that story. We play the victim. We live as if we're buffeted and bruised by this arbitrary world.... We look outside ourselves for the source of our unhappiness, but we're looking in the wrong place. The source is always within us."

~ Terence Grant (Source: The Silence of Unknowing)