How do you keep your composure and stay happy even though the world falls apart around you?

Last weekend a man died in my front yard/ That is some current events that hits pretty close to home. As an individual event did not hit big news, but collectively, public shootings are happening with such frequency, the news doesn’t cover them all. It was shocking, upsetting, and a bit frightening. I cannot allow it to be consuming. My daughter and I must continue with our lives. That does not mean forget the incident entirely. That would be irresponsible. We must take precautions to ensure our safety. We lock our doors. We consider time of day when we chose whether to goo somewhere and such.
With all these shocking events however big they are in the news, should be given our attention. We should do what we can ro improve things for ourselves and others. We move ahead with our lives the best we can. We should not dwell on the events in such a way which impairs the forward motion of lives, progress, safety,or hope. Yes, hope moves forward with us. When it stops, moves such events from tragic to catastrophic.

What other choice do we have?

Think of this question when you are at your lowest. You get to decide how you want to move on after life shows you its worst. I’m not saying you are going to be happy, but you can live and not hate every minute of it.

I don’t focus unduly upon the negative. That would just make me depressed as well as myopic.

How did I come to this realization?

Following my Mother’s unexpected death (by suicide) I went through a very dark and negative period in my life.

I was just unrelentingly negative about everything with everybody. I had, up until that time, been basically sunny and optimistic (since that is my basic nature) in spite of the difficult family circumstances in which I was raised.

But that was the last straw. I just felt that I was fully entitled to express my negative attitude and opinions constantly for several years. I was convinced that my previous optimistic attitude was inauthentic and I was just repressing the truth about everything. So now I was going to unhesitatingly express my negativity to anyone and everyone and be my ” authentic self”.

I spent several years that way and it didn’t change anything. All it did was make everyone reluctant to be around me.

Finally, one day I woke up and realized that I didn’t have to live a life this bleak. Regardless of circumstances (either personal or in the world in general) I had a choice in which direction I would focus, positive or negative.

Being “free” to be as negative as I wanted to be produced nothing but greater misery.

After that realization I gradually returned to the naturally optimistic person I had been since childhood.

That was a long time ago and I’ve never regretted the turnaround or felt inauthentic again.

We usually can’t control the circumstances that touch our lives (either personally or in the world in general) but we can control how we view them and what we focus upon.

The more we focus on the negative, the more we will be surrounded by negativity and that’s a really crappy way to live.

Obviously that’s not saying that we throw reality out the window. But we can put negative things in perspective as part of the whole rather than the main focus around which our all our thoughts and actions revolve.

Day Dreaming™

http://youtu.be/y6Sxv-sUYtM

Just sing along. :)

No one is happy all of the time, everyone has ups and downs in life. Being resilient is key, bouncing back. We can’t control all of the things that happen to us, but we can control our reaction to them. We make choices about how we cope with situations and we can allow them to consume us in a negative way or we can look at them as learning experiences and find the positives.