I went to see Practical Magic 2 recently, and somewhere between the witches, the sisterhood and all the magic, I found a pretty good life lesson.

Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman play sisters Sally and Gillian, and I could see a little bit of myself in both of them.

Sally has become somewhat stuck. She’s closed herself off and sworn off love, and in doing so, she’s also shut down a part of herself. Gillian, on the other hand, is more open. She’s trying to remind her sister that there is still magic inside her and that she has the ability to open her heart again.

At one point, they’re talking about changing, and Gillian says something that really stuck with me:

“You are the remote control.”

Well.

That got me thinking.

How many times have I sat around waiting for someone else to change the channel?

Waiting for someone to say the right thing.

Waiting for someone to make a different decision.

Waiting for a situation to change.

Waiting for circumstances to get better so I could feel better.

Waiting for someone else to make me happy, give me an opportunity, fix a relationship, understand my perspective or somehow make my life look different.

All the while, I’m sitting there holding the remote.

Why am I waiting for someone else to change the channel?

We do this more than we realize.

We give other people the remote control to our happiness. We let circumstances determine our mood. We let someone else’s behavior dictate how we feel about ourselves. We wait for the outside world to change before we’re willing to change something on the inside.

But maybe we have more control than we think.

That doesn’t mean we can control everything. We absolutely can’t.

We can’t control what someone else does. We can’t control every outcome. We can’t magically make the difficult parts of life disappear.

But we can decide what we do next.

We can change the channel.

We can stop watching the same story we’ve been replaying in our heads.

We can choose a different perspective.

We can close a chapter.

We can open our hearts again.

We can change our response.

We can decide that something that once defined us doesn’t have to define us forever.

And maybe that’s the real magic.

Not changing everything around us, but realizing that we have a say in what we watch, what we focus on and where we go next.

So the next time you find yourself thinking, I wish this would change, or I wish they would change, or I just want things to be different, maybe ask yourself:

Am I waiting for someone else to change the channel?

Because you might already be holding the remote.

And if you are…

Change the channel.

XX,

MG