Feel Good Friday

Stray dog joins racing team.

A young woman reaches out to a family having a bad day.

Austin teen raises money for an automatic door for his wheelchair.

A child with autism asks for mail for Christmas, and hundreds respond.

Bystanders rescue strangers from an apartment complex.

Michigan cops and UPTV teamed up to hand out presents instead of tickets.

You get to choose your attitude today, and every day.  What do you choose today?  Do you choose to focus on what makes you happy and grateful, or what makes you sad and full of longing?

The Best Time of My Life

Mystery Castle, Phoenix AZ
Photo Credit: Doree Weller

Facebook inspires me from time to time, but not in ways that I would predict.  For instance, I was recently reading something an old high school friend wrote, and I realized, “This person thinks the best times of their life has passed.”  How sad.

Too many people seem to think that thinking positively is a cheap trick, mired in avoiding reality.  Thinking positively doesn’t have to be about avoiding reality.  It doesn’t work to avoid it anyway; try to avoid reality, and it will come and smack you in the face.  Hard.

No, the thing is, that most of what we’re thinking positively vs. thinking “realistically” about hasn’t actually happened yet.  How is it more realistic to think negatively about something that hasn’t happened than positively?  I believe that our energies attract things.  The nice thing about my positive thinking is that if the bad stuff never comes to pass, then I didn’t waste time worrying about it.  And if it does come to pass, then I deal with it.

I believe that every day, life can be an adventure.  And it often is an adventure.  Whether it’s a fun adventure or a frightening adventure is often decided by the person living it.  I’ve gone through bad times in my life.  And they weren’t improved by me being miserable about them.

Everyday is a choice… but will you choose adventure or irritability?  Do you have something to learn today, or has it all been done?  Are the best years behind you, or is the best stuff happening right now?

It’s all about choices.

Depressed

It was quite a few years ago that I was really depressed.  The problem was that I didn’t realize I was depressed until I looked back at it years later.

I had a really bad year or so from late 2003 to 2004 and beyond.  It started in November 2003 when my husband lost his job.  Over the next 6 months, both his parents had died (in their 50s), my family stopped talking to me, we moved, and I got a newer, more stressful job.  For the next couple of years, I walked around in a daze.  I was just going through the motions of life, but I didn’t really seem to enjoy anything.  I was tired all the time.  It was like the world had turned from color to sepia and I didn’t even know it.

After a couple years of being a grumpy pessimist who saw the worst in everything, I woke up one day around my birthday and realized that I hated my attitude.  I had started saying things like, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade… but I’m all out of sugar.”  As ridiculous as it sounds, one day after I said that, I thought, “But if I were really out of sugar, I’d just go to the store and get more.  There’s always more sugar somewhere.”  That thought kept me going when I didn’t feel like being more cheerful.  I realized that I just had to keep looking for my sugar.

It didn’t happen overnight, but eventually I got my positive, cheerful attitude back.  I became myself again, and hopefully a newer, more improved version of myself.  It wasn’t until years later that I realized I had been depressed.  When I was going through it, I had no idea, and because I had moved and my family wasn’t speaking to me, I had no one around me to remind me that who I was wasn’t who I had been.

Since then, I’ve moved again, found a job I love, and reconciled with my family.  Things are better now, but they didn’t get better on their own.  I could have chosen to still be miserable, but I didn’t.  I had to change my attitude first.