Attitude is Everything

That's the title of a book my uncle sent me a decade ago, when I was first pregnant with my daughter and her father turned his back on me. 

And he was right.  Well - maybe it's not just about attitude - - I think it's about perception.  Steven Covey discusses this in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (a book I believe should be required reading for anyone who is not a total hermit).  When life seems horrible, Covey claims, we need to make a "paradigm" shift.  Change the way we look at things.  Adjust the lens.

I try like heck to do this, but sometimes my lenses refuse to cooperate.  They get foggy a lot.  Sometimes they change color.  I swear half the time I can't even FIND them, so I can hardly see anything clearly at all.  But having recently been dealing with someone who refuses to even WEAR his lenses, I suddenly understand just how important it is to make sure I keep track of mine - take care of them - and understand that regardless of what is going on out there in the world, I still have the power to turn the dial and shift my focus.  It's like the color adjustment on the t.v.  Sometimes people look green - - other times they rival Barney in hue.  You have to be a total idiot to think that's truly the way someone looks!  It doesn't take that much effort to adjust the color settings!  Yeah - it's more complex now that everything's digital and you have to go searching through the menu and figure out which buttons to push to get it adjusted, but come on - - isn't that wee bit of trouble worth if it you can see things clearly in the end?

Mini Me was writing about the California Poppy the other day.  Intriguing flower, that one.  It is said to proliferate in areas recently burned out by fire.  Funny, but I think most people's focus in the midst of a forest fire would be on the devastation it wreaks - not on the possibility that vibrant, beautiful flowers might just pop up out of the ashes.  But when you're staring at a fire, wouldn't you RATHER think of something positive coming out of it than sink into grief over what it might be destroying?  Fire burns more readily when what it's burning is dead and dried out.  Sometimes we need to remember that all that dead stuff should be destroyed anyway.  And then we can look forward to the flowers that might pop up in its place.