Controlling the Genre

I recently saw a Facebook post talking about what we can and can't control in our lives. Our lives are like a movie, where we control (some aspects of) the main character, and precious little else. We can't control the rest of the cast or the budget or the overall plot, but according to the Facebook post, we can control the soundtrack by wearing headphones. That's true in a lot of circumstances, but one thing I think the post got wrong is saying that we can't control the genre.

I think that we can control the genre of the story of our lives. Granted, we can't control the events of our lives and how our decisions play out, but we can control our attitude about what happens. If we choose to view the events of our lives as funny, we can make our lives comedies. If we choose to view events as terrible, we can make them tragedies. Our lives may involve action we don't want, but that doesn't automatically make our lives action films. Yet, if we want our lives to be action films, we can add action to just about anything, at least in our imaginations. For those with enough imagination and the right attitude, we can make our lives fit whatever genre we want for it.

So, we can control the actions of the main character, we can control the soundtrack that plays in our headphones or our heads, and we can control the genre by controlling how we view the events of the film. There are certain times when it feels like we have no control of our lives, like we're strapped to a chair, watching our lives play out before us like a film. But there are a few things that we can always control, and our attitude is one of them. We can't always choose what happens, but we can choose our emotional response to what happens, and that's what allows us to control the genre of our lives.