I cannot control the events that occur around me, nor the things that may happen to me.  What I can control is how I react and respond to them.  Generally, there are no good or bad events, but only our interpretation of the events and what they means to us personally.  It is like being in the weightlessness of space; there is no up or down, just a conscious assignment of the direction of up or the direction of down.  Direction is meaningless until we give it labels and the meaning that goes with those labels.  Part of the mindfulness challenge we all are faced with is to allow events to occur without assigning our conditioned meaning to them.  When we understand that our reactions to events are conditioned by our experiences we can learn to disassociate these responses from future events and become more detached and observant rather than reactant to the events themselves.

Wherever you go, there you are.  Jon Kabat-Zinn

To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is. Thích Nhất Hạnh

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Pema Chödrön