My favorite spiritual teachers teach what happens in the world is simply what happens. It is what it is. How we react to what happens, what we make of it, how we evaluate it, how it annoys us, whether we want it to not be what it is, label it bad, good, wonderful or terrible, are all what we make of it. It, however, is simply what happened.

They point out that a thing having happened, it cannot unhappen. The past is inaccessible, no matter how much fretting and fussing, anguish and self-torture we choose to inflict upon ourselves.

The word “choose” is stressed. We’ve been taught for a lifetime that the agency for our anguish lies outside us, that the event caused our feelings, our dismay, our intense feelings, that something was done to us and the quality and color of our reaction is due to this outside cause.

They, I think rightly, tell us that it is not the event that determines what we make of it, but it is how our mind chooses to react, and that if we change our mind so that we realize the choice is ours, our reaction will be different. We’ll be closer to perceiving reality and further from painting it with our emotions.

I was unable to write a column for this month before the election. I knew whatever the election brought would need to be available to me so I would know what readers had available to them. So, I waited. The election occurred.

For the next 10 days I was frozen. Unable to come up with an idea. I knew all the pontificators would be spreading their wisdom and I felt averse to joining them.

Then, this morning, someone close to me expressed how frustrated and annoyed they would be if someone they were doing a task for acted in a certain way, which they often did. I, being me, could not refrain from lecturing on how they were choosing their reaction in advance. And then I launched into the beginning of this column.

Surprisingly, and contrary to what often goes on in our discussions, they gradually bought what I was saying. We parted with me expressing my delight that they’d been so receptive.

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Afterward, probably stemming from my previous awareness of the symmetry between worry and guilt — in that guilt is a useless bad feeling about something done or not done, and worry is a useless bad feeling about something that might happen in the future, where in both cases one should extract any useful component that’ll help future action and dump the bad feeling — it occurred to me this way of looking at things might apply not only to previous happenings but also to things that may happen.

I thought instead of fretting about things that may happen, what if we adopt the stance that things that are yet to happen, our imaginings about the future, will resolve themselves once they either happen or do not?

Looking into the to-be-resolved future, nonexistent as it presently is, we can still be sure that once it resolves into a particular collection of events, it will have happened. And just as an event that has already happened, it will be what it is, and as unchangeable as any event that has already happened.

Doris Day had it right. Que sera sera. What will be will be. And it will be set in the unchangeable stone of the past. We, in its past, when the time comes, will be able to choose what to make of it. Hopefully in this scenario, too, we will not choose to believe that the events to be will make us feel the way we do.

I hope it is clear I am not arguing for determinism in any of the above. The determinism I am not arguing for says given the laws of nature and the state of the universe at a given moment, it would be possible to know what will happen in the next moment. And so on.

But I made no commitment about how happenings come about. Just that they do.

Besides, the hypothesis of determinism is irrefutable, and therefore unscientific because even if every person in the world were to agree that determinism is false, that would not be incompatible with the thesis of determinism because the world might just be determined to bring that state of affairs into existence.

Richard S. Bogartz is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an Amherst justice of the peace.