If you live in Switzerland, the only thing you think of melting is cheese. If you have my stomach, you avoid that fun activity altogether. The only fondue I indulge in as my guilty pleasure is the chocolate one. However, there is another thing that can melt away and that is formation of new paradigm.

Once a paradigm is formed, it takes time to replace it. But what with the ones that are being formed as we speak? Paradigms are usually not made in a day and there is a certain process that follows them, which includes several consecutive events in a relatively short period of time, including dose of assumption and “connecting the dots”. Let me give you an example. If over the last two months some of your colleagues have made you feel bad at work, not long will pass until you start dreading work, because you will expect the same pattern in the future.

It is crucial to sometimes choose to isolate these events for the sake of our own well-being. Why is that? Forming a negative paradigm means two things: you will start observing every future event through the glasses of your new found belief, which will mean that every upcoming situation is destined to be judged in a same way, even though it might even not be what you believe it is. So if someone is having a bad day and snaps at you, you will immediately connect it to a chain of previous events. Secondly, you will not have a choice other than to react according to what your paradigm tells you.

However, if you choose to isolate the event and even reframe the issue, you get the choice to give it a new meaning, to pick your response, instead of having an angry of frustrated reaction. Give it the old good “fact vs. opinion” test and check how much you contribute to the situation. Empowering, isn’t it?

In the end, we should be the ones giving the meaning to the world around us. And nobody said it better than Oscar Wild:

“But strange that I was not told

That the brain can hold

In a tiny ivory cell

God’s heaven and hell.”