The World

The world is your oyster!

I bet when you read that, you automatically listed the ways in which it is clearly not.

“Huh,” you said to yourself. “She obviously doesn’t know my life!” You haven’t hit this milestone or achieved that goal. There is laundry piled up on your dining table. You’re overwhelmed at work. Your hot flashes are making it impossible to sleep. Your kitchen sink is leaking, the toilet’s not flushing properly, your best friend is allergic to your new cat.  It’s endless!

In this life, those things aren’t hard to find. There are always things that are less than perfect, not quite what you’d planned, or even absolutely, desperately miserable. The less-than-perfect is always there. But you know what?

So is the good stuff. The funny stuff. The beautiful stuff. The heart-warming stuff. It’s always there, too. Yet so often we don’t see it nearly as readily.

There’s something about the human psyche, something dark and self-defeating, because even when pretty nearly everything is going well, we will focus in hard on the one thing that isn’t.

Why do we do that to ourselves?

What would it be like if we regularly took time to look back and see how far we’ve come? How would our life feel if we made time to celebrate the good things in it? If we spent as much time thinking about the good stuff as we do bemoaning the bad?

Exponentially better, I bet, even if the balance of good stuff and tedious stuff remained the same. It would feel better. Much better. That’s not delusional. We’re not pretending the bad stuff isn’t there. We’re just choosing to switch our focus to the good. Is it somehow better to pretend the good stuff isn’t there?

Why not choose to see the good instead?

That is what The World invites you to do.

Let’s make October the month to  truly Celebrate our life, and every single good thing in it we can think of. Generally, the more you think about things, the more you notice them. Remember when you were pregnant? Or newly engaged? Suddenly, there were round, pregnant bellies everywhere, diamonds on every other ring finger! Where did they all come from?

They’d been there all along, of course, and in roughly the same number. We just weren’t seeing them.

So now, let’s see the good. Let’s not just blip on over it, in our endless pursuit of the tedious and dreary. Let’s see it, pause for a second or two to notice it. Let’s celebrate every good thing, big and small.

I bet there’s a month’s worth of good in your life. Let’s find it, and celebrate!