“It is not so important that things go as I think they should, as it is that I should be the master of them through self-control” –Unity.
This rule can be applied to any experience you may have. If you are working among people whose manners and habits jar upon you, apply this rule and watch developments. Once you control yourself you will be surprised to find how many things which annoy you will change or disappear.
As long as you are a slave to your own irritable nerves and whims, you will find the world is one succession of sharp corners against which you bruise yourself at every move. When you become master of yourself, the corners will round into curves imperceptibly but surely.
The same rule applies in your home. What attitude are you taking toward your family, relatives, and friends and toward humanity? Are you posing as a martyr? Do you wear the resigned expression of a wronged creature who must submit to persecution, or a sullen, resentful one, or a belligerent one? Are you thinking and brooding over your wrongs and making yourself and others miserable in consequence?
If you are doing any one of these things, you are a criminal —far worse than many a convict behind prison bars. If you are disturbing the peace of your household, the comfort of your partner, children, relatives, or friends with your temper, your complaints, or your sarcasm, then you are a murderess. It is a more unpardonable crime than many committed by people who are condemned by judge and jury, no matter how high your standing in church or community. No person can be considered truly good unless they are agreeable to those they associate with daily.
Perhaps you have been wronged and abused, and you tell me your troubles have destroyed your nervous system, and that you cannot help being irritable and cross, and saying unpleasant things at times. I tell you in reply that the most admirable, agreeable, and angelic woman I ever knew was a wronged wife, a woman who had suffered every indignity, humiliation, and neglect possible from a mean, brutal-natured man. Yet she made a heaven for her children and friends in her home. She had learned this great law of becoming Master of Circumstances through self-control.
Although the things around her were not to her liking, she made them seem trivial before her calm self-conquest. She said to herself: “Though my best love, faith, and hopes have been thrown into the dust, I will not let myself go down. I have lost respect for the man to whom I gave my life’s happiness, but I will not lose respect for myself, and I will show the world that I can create happiness, even if I cannot find it where I hoped it would be, in my marital life.”
Surely, this was better than becoming soured, aggressive, complaining, and pessimistic, and making her presence dreaded by all her associates.
There was a great French writer who said, “If you don’t have what you like, like what you have”. But even if you cannot like your environment, you can make yourself a master of it, and refuse absolutely to be dominated by it. You can grow and rise above it; and after a time, if you do this, the environment will change and circumstances will alter to your will.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox. “The art of being alive” (1914)