Nothing is but thinking makes it so.

Hamlet may have been reaching for some certainty when he said this line, but it still can guide us. Everything we think in response to an event is a construction that we are placing on that event or feeling. And it might be wrong.

If I feel I will die if I don't buy a new car, then my thinking has made that so - not reality. If I feel my life is an empty failure then I'm presuming I can know the totality of effects that result from my life, which is arrogant, to say the least.

Yet, I can also c...