The Side Effect of Positive Thinking

I have a class every Saturday morning. Today, in it, we started discussing about what is a positive attitude and why shoud we have this in our every day lives. One of my classmates said that the situation today was enough to be a negative force -- how was it that we could have a positive attitude in such a negative world.

It is true. Sometimes we feel as if the universe is against us; as if the Powers that Be are plotting around their cauldron, stirring it and laughing at the plans that get ruined, the lovers we don't get, the raises we don't obtain, the cars we drive, the life we're supposed to live. But it's also true that in every waking moment, the miracle of life is within us, and as such, the love of the Goddess and the Virtue of the God is also within.

My aunt Nina used to tell me a story. She said that when she was a little girl, her ink bottle spilled all over her school work and that she was so upset about it she started to cry. My grandmother then looked at her and insted of conforting her she said, "Do you think that tears are going to clean everything up? Okay - cry then". My aunt was so angry that she stopped crying. My grandmother then pulled on her ears to make her cry, "Cry! Cry harder! All the problems in the world will be solved with you crying!" After this, my grandmother looked at the mess and told her, "So you see? Your tears did nothing to clean the mess, did nothing to return the ink in the bottle, and did nothing to make your homework again. So you have two choices: keep crying over nothing or actually DO something about it."

True fact, I told my classmate, that we live in a non-optimistic day an age. But crying and complaning about it will do little close to nothing to make things better. A positive attitude CAN go a long way. It doesn't mean that you have to go all smiles, all the time. It will, however, give you a broader perspective of what to expect from life. The secret of life, I said, is to keep in mind that happiness is not a THING, a ONE THING: it's a series of events, of little moments in your life, that shine through and remind you of how good it is to feel alive. If all you do is play the victim, complain, see things for how dark they are, or how bad they are, or how terrible they look, then you will probably not going to realize the moments you were happy.

Not everyone achieves this. And it's not an easy thing to achieve. You can say that it's easy for me to say --- but it wasn't easy to get to this point in my life. I had to go through a lot of personal change for me to finally realize this. And once I realized it, came the other factor: the will to accept the fact that I was wrong in many things and that other people were right. This is probably the hardest thing to do.

So... start your path today. It's never too late to realize you too have the right to be happy. That no matter what, you always have the second shot at life. A positive attitude brings back a lot of life's gifts and joys.