The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts. . . take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature. -Marcus Aurelius
It's true that our thoughts take us places. We like to cling to the illusion that we're in complete control of our thoughts, but we definitely aren't. They have a life of their own, and they often take us to places that we don't really want to go, especially when we're feeling down or lonely or confused or just lost. Our thoughts can make us feel terrible when we otherwise would just be feeling a bit down, and our thoughts have a way of feeding off of each other, growing stronger somehow as they grow more negative. One of my lifelong goals has been to not allow my thoughts to take me to dark places, to not allow them to control me. I spent too many years dealing with severe depression, and I know that much of that depression was caused by my negative thoughts feeding off of each other and growing stronger and stronger until they overwhelmed me. I've spent years trying to train myself to focus on positive thoughts, and to try to replace negative thoughts with positive ones as soon as I recognize them. I'm still not extremely good at it, but I'm better. And I'm glad for that because I really didn't like the places that my negative thoughts took me, and I really do like the places that my positive thoughts open up to me.
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