Consider the last time someone made you angry. Or, if that would upset you, think about the last time you were delighted by a surprise call from a long-lost friend. Or recall how happy you felt when your Thanksgiving dinner turned out perfectly. Or perhaps how anxious you felt when you noticed your car’s fuel might be too low to reach the next town.

Let’s re-analyze how we think about these events. Someone said something, and you chose to be angry. You chose to feel delight in response to the surprise call. You chose to feel happy about the dinner. You chose anxiety as your response to the possibility of running out of gas.

Yes, I know — you have no recollection of making a choice. It seems as if the feeling simply happened to you, as if the external event was the cause of it. The world did something to you, and you responded with a feeling. Often, the part of the world that “did it” is a person.

By the word locus, I mean the effective or perceived location of something. By the word agency, I mean action or intervention, especially one that produces a particular effect. The subject for discussion here is the locus of agency for your emotional responses to events in the world.

All our lives, we’ve been taught that occurrences in the world have the power to make us feel bad. The locus of agency for our emotions in response to external events is perceived as “out there,” not “in here.” Even the words I just used — “in response to” — suggest the agent for our emotion is external.

But I suggest that this belief is incorrect. It is not the external event that is the agent for our emotional response. The event we observe is simply what it is. I would modify the familiar idiom: “It is what it is, and that is all that it is.”

Our instinctive response may be, “No, the event made me respond that way.” But all we need to do to question this notion is to remember that someone else might respond in the opposite way to the same event. The event cannot simultaneously be two different things. The agency for our opposite responses must lie within us.

I would argue that we make different choices about how to respond to the same event. It is the observers who are different, not the event that is somehow dual in nature.

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I believe that, all our lives, we have been taught that it is events that make us feel the way we do. But in fact, events simply are what they are. Someone yells at us, and we think, they made me feel bad. No — they simply yelled. A different person might find the yelling amusing instead of upsetting. A driver who has cultivated the understanding that events simply are what they are would not reach for a pistol when cut off in traffic. (I assume everyone but me carries a pistol on their passenger seat — that’s why I no longer make obscene gestures at drivers who violate my rules of the road!)

I think we suffer from a plague of these “locus of agency” errors. That’s why the phrase “locusts of agency” popped into my playful mind. Think of all the negative emotions that might be avoided if we realized that the other person is saying what they’re saying simply because of who they are, and that’s all that’s happening. I can choose to feel attacked by what’s going on, or I can calmly try to understand what’s happening.

Changing our minds and actions in response to a 720-word argument like this one is not easy, especially when we’ve had a lifetime of training to believe that the locus of agency is external. Thinking of our responses as choices takes a lot of work — a lot of change. Perhaps a slight modification of Shakespeare’s “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” could help.

I suggest: “There is nothing about the locus of agency that is either here or there, but thinking makes it so.” I believe this, and I’ve been working on living it. Occasionally, it’s my first response. More often, it’s a revision after I make the “locust” response.

Try it. You’ll like it.

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