When the original Matrix movie came out, I was all over it. I loved that movie. The plot was so well put together and they had a way to answer everything, like the reason for deja vu, for instance. I actually left the movie after seeing it for the first time wondering if we really were living in the Matrix.

Obviously, I came to my senses soon after but the movie did give me a lot of things to think about. One of them came to mind this morning. At one point in the movie, Agent Smith is explaining the Matrix and how it works to keep us from waking up. He explains that there had been previous versions of the Matrix that had not worked. Why? Because they (the machine’s) made it perfect.

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. ~Agent Smith

Hmmmm. There’s something to that, don’t you think? I mean, even if we’re not actually being used as batteries right now by the very machine’s we created, the idea that we define our lives through imperfections and problems has some truth to it.

It’s a common theme; it seems to be human nature to gravitate towards the negative, towards the things that are wrong in our lives. It’s completely reasonable at first glance- I mean, things that are “wrong” need our attention so they can be repaired, while the things that are going well in life don’t require any attention. In the end giving all your attention to your problems only promotes suffering and misery, because all you see is the bad stuff. No one has a perfect life. The trick to making it an abundant life is finding balance between being grateful for the things that are right and identifying the things that are wrong without dwelling on them.

But let’s get back to Smith. What happens when everything is going right in life? What does your mind do? There is this tendency I think to look for something that’s potentially wrong in your life if something’s not staring you straight in the face. For example, your job and family life and all the important stuff are great; there seems to be nothing to be unhappy about. Suddenly, you find yourself pissed off or upset and why? Because the vending machine stole your money, because some guy on the highway cut you off on the way to work, or because you spilled a spot of coffee on your new dress.

We will seek out things that discontent us if we don’t have any major life complications. All these examples… they’re just things. Things that happen to us everyday, no matter what we do. The choice we have is whether to acknowledge them, and if we do, whether we allow them to cause us suffering. While Smith is right, we tend to define our lives by the negative, that doesn’t have to be the case. We can choose, that’s the beauty of being human and not a machine.

So, the next time you’re about to let something or someone spoil your day, ask yourself how much it really matters? My favorite question to ask myself is whether I will care about this tomorrow, or a month from now. If it’s something like a broken vending machine, I’m not going to care about that tomorrow so there’s no sense giving all my energy towards being upset about it.

My last piece of advice: when everything seems right with the world, don’t say to yourself that something has to be wrong, just say thank you.

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