“Men are not influenced by things, but by their thought about things.”
–Epictetus
The most profound truths in life have been known for centuries, but are still ignored by a majority of those who live today. The Greek philosopher Epictetus, a freed Roman slave, was a powerful thinker and a gifted writer. His writings had a major impact on the thinking of many who came after him and on the development of Christian philosophy.
This quotation by Epictetus refers to a basic truth in life. It’s not what happens to us–but how we react to, and think about, the events of our lives–that determines whether we will be happy. It was true 2,000 years ago, and it is true today. The way we think about things, rather than the things themselves, determines how we will be affected by both the positive and negative events that we encounter during our journey through life.
We all know people who have had more than their share of hard knocks in life, and, yet, have been able to maintain a cheerful disposition and find happiness whenever and wherever they could. We also know of people who have been quite privileged, but never seem to have a happy day. They are constantly complaining about the present and the past, and fretting about the future. Abraham Lincoln recognized these patterns in the lives of people he had observed, and he summed it up by saying, “People are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
Most of us experience only a limited number of catastrophic events, such as the death of a loved one, during life’s journey. A few of us might experience two or three such events in a particular five-year period, but then we might go twenty years before severe tragedy strikes again. When such things happen, we are bound to be devastated and we will suffer a great deal of pain as we make our way through the various stages of grief. We all suffer terribly during such periods, and it is almost inevitable that all of us will have to suffer such pain once or more during our journey through life. But how long we suffer is, to a large degree, up to us. We will never get completely over our losses, but we need not dwell on them for the next ten or twenty years.
There is absolutely nothing that any of us can do that will undo things that have happened in the past. We can feel sorry for ourselves for the rest of our lives, or we can get on with life and find happiness once more no matter what has happened. The choice is ours. It is not what happens to us in life that determines whether we can be happy. It is how we think about what has happened to us.
Think about it.
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Copyright 2026
Allen W. Smith
