smile

Daily Gratitude challenge: using my Gratitude compass

Our lives are built on the same amount of failure as success.

When I feel my attitude slipping a bit, I readjust it by using my Gratitude compass. Focusing on even the smallest of things to be grateful for in my life. Will right the ship in due time. Sometimes it takes awhile, but course changes are some of the hardest things personally for me to except as needing to be done. Things look right, but feel wrong.

It’s too easy to become lost within foggy thoughts, or the great corn maze of life. Feeling alone, afraid, or even desperate, to solve anything quickly. Suddenly we focus on our impatient selves, and the here and now of life, rather than on the whole of it.

It is easy to expect more, demand more, while seeing less all around us. But our lives are built on the same amount of failure as success if we only looked closer.

Failure teaches us what works and what doesn’t. It prepares us to lower expectations and increase efforts all the while redirecting us onto a different pathway towards our original goal. Failure helps us take inventory of our lives. If only we didn’t use it as the only focal point. Lastly, failure is that classroom in the collage of hard knocks–that education given in hopes to push us away from the next future failure. To bad, myself included, we’re too often attracted to failures and focused on them; we’re all to busy magnifying those negative things in life to then realize it’s not a magnet attracting us to it. It’s our own desires, and wants, rather than our own efforts that we are focused on. Failures are there to teach us, not to be those bug zapper traps that zap us by attracting us to them until like a bug, zap! Your finished, your a failure.

A pile of wood boards and nails by themselves aren’t anything other than a pile of boards and nails. It we then work at building a box using them, that box may turn out perfect or slightly out of square, but still a box. Success in both instances in creating that box. Just not the same skill in finished product. Its people that passes judgment of success or failure, that says, I’m not a carpenter. Its the collage of hard knocks that says through efforts your skills will improve at being a great carpenter–and then being able to build a perfectly square box. But it’s failure within judgments and a comparison to what could be, within unrealistic time frames that creates the feeling of being a failure. It is in facing challenges, or obstacles, that should cause us to redirect our efforts according to our visions of our goals. Not the judgments or comparisons of what other people expect of us. But being more realistic in our planing, our execution, and our time frames, to get to where we want to be.

This is why I say our lives are built on the same amount of failures or maybe even more than our success.

It hard I know. But be thankful and even grateful for those opportunities and for those experiences to experience new things. Risking having found some success or failure. Enjoy everything with gratitude that you tried doing something new. Now push yourself towards your successes using your gratitude compass along with making a greater effort to be all you can be.

All the best.

Dancing on the couch.

How would you define happiness? It shouldn’t seem that happiness would be that much of an issue to define, though everyone defines it differently. For some it just living a carefree life–without a worry in the world–the bills are paid–they’ve got it made in the shade–our toes are in the sand and now we can have a drink in hand….blah,blah,blah.
For others it’s more than some finical security. Professionally speaking they seek a stable relationship / or other wise wanting everything else that would register as a life being good. The very things we all look for over the fence at your neighbors while neglecting to fertilize ours.

Is having to think about what makes you happy the first indication that happiness just maybe farther from reach then you think? Well unbuckle a bit from that easy chair to extend your reach a little.

Nobody ever actively has to think about, it’s time to be that happy go lucky person–pasting that smile on–add in some better facial expressions–mix in some glowing sunny dispositions, and bang! Instant happiness just as we thought it.

You either are, or are not happy. Usually we act first and then think about it later. But aren’t we what we choose to build ourselves into?

Going to happy hour at the local watering hole is just seeking a chemical change. It’s looking for that outside force of life to dictate emotional feelings. The funny thing about emotions are they change, often, way too rapidly. Yet observing people who display more times then not that true happiness, one would also see true stability. A life not totally devoid of that roller coaster ride of ups and downs, but one of self control, controlling emotional responses while acting proactively towards a smooth finish.

Children seem to be more honest with life and displays of emotional feelings. For them emotions come, and just as easily go, all to be forgotten in the excitement to experience what is around the next bend in the road. It’s adults that fertilize various emotions while hiding true feelings. It’s a childish game all the while hoping that someone else will come to the rescue and change it all for us. And if that fails, reach for the chemicals to try to mimic happy hour permanently.

Adults should stop storm chasing, living for the drama in flashes of lightning and the explosions of thunder. But except that with every storm that comes by, there is a peace, and a fresh scented calm after the rain / and all the tears.

Use your child like intensity to live life, knowing that you won’t control every aspect of it, but that you build your own master pieces by choosing the building blocks to be used in it. Kind of like playing with lego’s when you were a kid. You can build anything following your dreams and imagination.

So if you find yourself dancing on the couch….or jumping on your bed, it maybe the weekend? Or your inner child may have exploding to the surface in full display, while embracing the little moments, acting as you truly feel….being happy. Because there is someone else in the world that would be just as happy with what little you think that you have.
Don’t spill the coffee jumping around though. :^)
All the best.

The sky is the limit or should it be laying the moon at your feet

As people all too often we set limits to our dreams way to low. How often have you heard people say “The sky is the limit.”?
Is that even true?
When half of the people in the world are just as often below as above average. Tabulating all people is how being average even comes about. Making therefore the sky your goal seems to be an above average existence; but laying the moon at your feet is a clear’er understanding of what it means to be on top….in taking your best shot, in shooting to be above average. Because everyone looks up at the moon and it has footprints on it.
All the best.

The melting pot–quote of the day / Gratitude challenge mash-up.

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed. Its all because “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”

Am I saying to begin living life it has to be from a state of discomfit?

Sadly I’m announcing that I will no longer be doing the Gratitude challenge as everyone seems to be doing it. But will post regular posts of what I’m grateful for / a showing of Gratitude. So here it goes…

To what I was saying before. I’m saying statistically 70% of people choose to keep things to themselves to avoid being judged by others, to make themselves more comfortable. Life challenges us to live, so how is it living life when you’re just sitting in a comfortable easy chair…feet lifted up, all relaxed like? Where are the exciting experiences of life–in the chair, or just beyond that foot rest?

Life is uncertain, it full of challenges, possibilities of success or failure. Is it really living when we seek out living without risk? Nothing ventured is nothing gained, or no pain, no gain, could also mean that it takes risk of failure to enjoy success and therefore being able to take a rest, to relax a bit in life comes after having lived the life you have been given? But nothing in life is ever meant to be permanent…except when we….stop living.

“Never be afraid to fall apart, because it gives you the opportunity to rebuild yourself the way you wish you had been all along.”—Rae Smith

I’m grateful to be stumbling along, I have compleat Gratitude for failure; because I’m alive and have been given a new chance with each failure to rebuild myself better, to remodel, and to improve myself. Without failure I may think nothing is wrong, that I’m prefect–not having to make or take any farther actions. Should that be my goal? Is that what is required of living well, sitting in that easy chair all comfortable? Is that living life to it fullest?

“What ever you are be a good one.” Abraham Lincoln

Have a great weekend.
All the best

(Know quotes names were listed. The rest are unknown.)