Exit
mal meditation or mindfulness
practice, mentally strong people
tend to have a mindful, attentive
way of engaging with the world.
“You could call it being in the
zone, you can call it whatever
you want, but the idea is that
if you’re focused exclusively on
one thing in front of you, you’re
not bringing baggage to that
situation and you’re considering
only the variables that matter,”
says Holiday.
BUT THEY KNOW WHEN
IT’S TIME TO LET GO.
Just as important as perseverance is the ability to recognize
that you can control only your
own actions — not the results of
those actions. Accepting this fact
allows us to resign to the things
that are beyond our power.
There’s an idea in Stoicism,
Holiday explains, called the “art
of acquiescence,” which is yielding to the things that you can’t
change and making the best of
them, rather than allowing them
to upset or frustrate you. The
mentally strong person lives by
the Serenity Prayer — they change
what they can control, accept
what they can’t control, and know
the difference between the two.
THE THIRD
METRIC
HUFFINGTON
03.02.14
THEY LOVE THEIR LIVES.
Amor fati is a Latin term that
translates to “love of fate,”
a concept derived from the ancient Greek and Roman Stoic
philosophers that later reemerged in the work of Nietzsche. And it’s perhaps the
single most important key to
mental strength.
Mentally strong
people tend to be realistic
optimists — they have
the hopefulness of optimists
and the clarity of pessimists.”
“The idea is that you don’t
just have to tolerate the things
you can’t control — they could
be the greatest things that ever
happen to you,” says Holiday.
“You can find the joy in not just
accepting, but in embracing the
things that happen to you.”
Shortly before her death, Seattle-based author Jane Lotter
left that advice with her family
in a powerful self-written obituary. As Lotter put it, “May you
always remember that obstacles
in the path are not obstacles, they ARE the path.”