How to Create Your Own Heaven or Hell

By Bruce Shawkey

Heaven

Most importantly, never lose your sense of adventure. Don’t just drift through life going from task to task. Stay curious. Treat life like something to explore, not merely endure. Almost any experience can feel different when you approach it with the right mindset.

That shift matters more than most people realize. Much of what makes life feel dull or meaningful, draining or exciting, depends on the spirit we bring to it. Romance is not only about love stories—it is the ability to see life as vivid, interesting, and alive. Protect that feeling. The people who stay happiest are often the ones who never stop finding adventure in ordinary things.

Routine is part of life. It keeps things moving. But we have to be careful not to let routine drain the life out of living. You can see it happen everywhere. I remember reading a story of a restaurant in a busy town that used to be packed. A few years later, tables sat empty even while the rest of the town was thriving. What happened?  Why had business faded?

“I enjoyed it at first,” the owner replead,  “but nobody can stay interested forever serving soup and food to people all day. What’s the point of giving your life to that?”

And there it was. The problem wasn’t the restaurant. It wasn’t the town or the customers or the economy. The problem was that the owner had stopped seeing meaning in what he did. He had let boredom replace pride.

Almost any work can become deadening if approached without imagination, purpose, or care. But almost any work can also become meaningful when it is done with energy and a sense of contribution. Feeding people is not a small thing. Creating a welcoming place is not a small thing. Brightening someone’s day is not a small thing.

The people who continue to thrive—in work and in life—are usually the ones who stay emotionally engaged. They keep finding reasons to care. They refuse to become mechanical.

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Hell:

We humans possess an astonishing ability to create unnecessary misery for ourselves.

We lose our tempers and turn small problems into disasters. We let fear govern our thinking and indecision stall our lives. We allow selfishness, pride, envy, and jealousy to poison our relationships and peace of mind. We become arrogant when things go well and defeated when they do not. We drift into laziness, bitterness, resentment, or gloom.

And when several of these habits combine, we create a private kind of hell for ourselves. The tragedy is that much of this suffering is avoidable. The mind can become either a workshop for growth or a factory for misery. What we feed it matters.

Given enough time, habits shape not only our mood, but our entire experience of life. The good news is that the same mind capable of creating misery is also capable of creating peace. The habits that make life smaller can be replaced with habits that make it larger: gratitude instead of envy, courage instead of fear, humility instead of  pride/

Hell is rarely something that suddenly happens to us. More often, it is something we quietly build ourselves—thought by thought, choice by choice, day after day. Choose carefully.