Attitude

By | June 21, 2018

Attitude

It’s your attitude that makes the biggest difference every day of your life. Life is what happens to you and your attitude is how you react to it.

If you don’t think you have much to lose, just think about losing everything you have. I think you’ll find that you have much more than you think.

Attitude. The attitude that you embrace each day colors your world and everything in it.

Life is a series of challenges and setbacks, winning, losing, happiness, pain, pleasure, sorrow, happiness, triumphs, disappointments… and almost all play out upon the stage of your choosing. Maybe it’s not so much what happens to you as it is react to what happens to you.

Attitude.

Life is, in many ways, a series of contrasts. Good and evil. Happy and sad. Fun and toil. Pain and pleasure. Love and hate. Sun and rain. Cold and hot. But, most of us are lucky. For the most part, life is a long road paved with ordinary days.

Ordinary days are fragile and ephemeral. They are as a drop of dew on a spider’s web. A gust of wind or a falling leaf and the dew drop is destroyed and disappears.

Though our days are made of ordinary days most of us yearn for special days, days with events that lift us from the perceived doldrums of the ordinary days. A birthday, the birth of a child or grandchild, a special dinner. Yet, I believe that it’s the ordinary days, the ordinary moments that define us and define our lives. And the best we can aspire to is to know that the most special and memorable moments will not be the ones we’ve spent days planning, but the ones that happen when we are not waiting for them.

Attitude.

The other day I was taking a walk and I happened to pass by a vacant lot. Years ago, it wasn’t vacant, it belonged to an old man who once yelled at my son – he was then around 11 or 12 – and his friends for selling lemonade on the street corner opposite his house. My son, now in his middle 30’s still remembers that and so do I.

And anyway, I remembered it yesterday as I walked by that place, alone. I didn’t remember so much the man yelling at the kids for selling lemonade as I did the little song my son and I made up and sang every time we walked by his house.

His last name fit beautifully with the old Tom Jone’s song, “What’s New Pussycat”. I recalled the crisp fall days walking by the house of the “lemonade” man singing the song with the lyrics changed to fit his last name which was Creadleman.

“Creadleman, Creadleman, we love you,
Yes we do…
You and your Creadleman eyes .. wo wo wo
You can your Creadleman eyes…”

You get that idea. I smiled as I wrote that. Just remembering it made me smile. Now, don’t get me wrong, we didn’t sing it loud enough for him to hear us – or ever sing it when he was within earshot – we were not mean, just having fun.

Yesterday, was just another ordinary day, made a little more special by a memory that was elicited from walking by a now-vacant lot. And, it’s a funny thing, those few fleeting moments that I spent thinking about the days when my son and I walked by singing a song to the tune of “What’s New Pussycat” made that day special. My attitude changed and the world became a different place – if only for an hour or two.

I ended up texting my son and telling him about what I was thinking about as I walked by the old Creadleman house. It was now just a vacant lot with a pile of branches smack dab in the middle of it. But it was really a lot more than that.

Attitude.

That moment might have become a yearning moment, filled with sadness that those special days when my kids were young will never come again. But instead I chose to embrace the attitude of feeling lucky to have such wonderful memories that transform ordinary moments and ordinary days into special ones.

But it’s typical of my life and probably yours: Special moments, no matter how small, pop up in the middle the most ordinary of  “ordinary days”.

Ordinary days and ordinary moments can and do contain very special moments. And planned special days can become forgettable ordinary moments.

And it’s the not knowing that makes life interesting -and it’s also the not knowing that makes life challenging. No matter how well we plan for the future, there’s always a chance a curveball is going to be tossed at you and you’re going to have to deal with it. And it’s how you deal with the unexpected that determines how you view life. It’s your attitude that makes the biggest difference in how you see the world – and how the world sees you.

It’s your attitude that determines how you deal with what happens to you. It’s your attitude that colors your world and your live with all of its ordinary days, its catastrophes, its heartaches, its betrayals, its surprises, its joys, its terrors, its unknowns. There’s nothing you can do about tomorrow – tomorrow may never come. And there’s nothing you can do about yesterday. It’s already long gone.

Attitude.

All you have really have is today and your attitude toward whatever happens to you today. If you left yesterday’s sorrows burrow into your your life today, it’s because you choose to let it. It’s your attitude.

Your attitude determines how you live and how you view your world.  It determines how you treat yourself each day and how you treat each person who is in your life or who passes through it. Your attitude determines how you view the world.

Your attitude colors your life and it colors your world.

If you choose to worry about what may happen tomorrow or you let yesterday’s tragedies and hurts control today, it’s only because you let them.

But you are in control. You control your attitude. No one else does. No one else can. You can decide each day what attitude you will embrace for that day. You may not be able to make a bad day good, but you can make a bad day better. You may not be able to make a sorrowful day happier, but you can make it less sad.

You cannot control what’s going to happen tomorrow and you cannot change what happened yesterday. But you can control your attitude and your attitude colors everything you see, feel, hear and remember.

Your attitude is your compass as you navigate through life.

Attitude.

When you think you don’t have much, think how much you would lose if you lost it all. You’ll find you have a whole lot more than you think. Embrace the attitude that you have more than you think you do.

And no matter what happens to you, the attitude you choose to embrace can make the worst moments of you life better and the most ordinary moments of your life special.

Someone once said life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. And I believe it is the truth.

Your attitude colors your world. It can change how you see the world and how the world sees you.

2 thoughts on “Attitude

  1. Patricia Klun

    I agree with you. I am paralyzed from my upper/ensmiddle back, but still have the use of my arms and can do a lot for myself. I’m a long term (almost 7 years) resident in a nursing home. I harass all my caregivers with nonsense remarks, etc. they laugh and I get to laugh, which I feel heals. I play games, read books, listen to music, etc., all on my iPad. All these things keep y attitude in the right place. My sons visit as do other family members, so I have lots to be thankful for.

    Reply
  2. Mary Tyler

    Hi Patricia,

    Great attitude. I have just gone through losing my 56 yr old daughter due to a terrible illness, prior to that it was her husband , my beloved sister in law, brother in law and nearly losing my husband due to health problems. The past several years have been very demanding but somehow I’ve kept my sanity. Hopefully with luck I can pick up the pieces and be thankful.

    Bless you.

    Mary

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *