The human mind, most of the time, is pretty childish. I want this. I want to get away from that. I don’t want to lose this. I am afraid that will happen.

We have flashes of wisdom, of restraint and acceptance. But mostly our minds are piloting our lives with very simple instructions and beliefs. Get more of what you want, get less of what you don’t want. Stuff I want is good, stuff I don’t want is bad.
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Reacting to dilemmas with a sense of doom is highly conditioned for a lot of us though, so the trick is to recognize when it’s happening and remember that catastrophes are emotional states, not the situations themselves. That feeling of hitting a what I see as a roadblock usually makes me do all the things that make it worse: get angry, blame others, wish for deus ex machina to save me.

What I really should be doing is making sure I keep up the pace. I should walk into an unfolding catastrophe with the same sense of positive expectation as when I walk into a pleasant development. I’ve been doing this with smaller dilemmas and it’s amazing how it works. The dilemma itself — the uncertainty, the possibility of pain or cost, the scenario itself — doesn’t disappear right away, but its emotional status as a “problem” often vaporizes the moment I decide I’m not going to fret about it.
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Disasters all lead eventually to pleasures, new and wonderful people, and satisfied feelings about yourself, and so we might as well recognize that to walk into an unfolding catastrophe is ultimately the same as walking into the good times beyond it.
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…the emotional part is the only reason problems are so painful.