#5 Celebrate the good

When life gets hard, it’s all too easy to act like it has always been this way. I know I get that way when I’m stressed, depressed,tired and expired. Life starts to feel bleak. And not just bleak right now, but always so! You’ll never get over this cold, you’ll always feel tired, and even if you do: you just rise to fall again. Pretty depressing, right? Wrong! Life has its ups as well as its downs, but if we don’t learn to wield our ups, the downs will crush us. That’s what I want to focus on today: taking hold of your ups. 

If we were being honest with ourselves, we’d see that the bad in our lives is usually pretty much balanced out with good. It typically doesn’t feel like it, but it’s the truth. Even on those absolutely rotten days, there are things that are still going right for you. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying this to discredit your bad day. On the contrary, I am trying to imprison the bad day to just that day. Like I said, those bad times have a way of trying to spread out, like a big cloud of gloom. Have you ever noticed how you don’t typically ponder the meaning of life when you’re in a good mood? It seems that question is something that we search for when we ache. We want a reason to persevere, to press on. We want the pain to not be in vain. 

And although there is a discussion to be had on why we suffer, one thing we never put into practice is telling that pain to be silent. Here’s what I often do. I jot down all those questions I have while I’m not doing so well, and I save them for later. I say to myself “if there’s an answer to be had from these questions, it can be had whether I’m feeling happy or sad. For now, I must tend to my sadness.” 

And the way we tend to that sadness is by putting limiters on it. You see, we let go of discipline when things are going well for us. After all, why should we strive when we have arrived? When life shows us favor, there’s nothing else to strive for! And who wants to ruin a good day by thinking about a bad one? But that bad day will arrive regardless. And instead of being filled with dread, we should take charge and be prepared instead! U.S. general Norman Schwarzkopf once said “the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t sweat nearly enough, so I bleed entirely too much. 

But what exactly am I proposing? I think we should start paying more attention to all the good things we have in life. I have good health, a car to drive, a church to attend, and free time to ramble a bit for you guys! When we really start looking, there’s no end to the amount of good we have in our lives. We just stop paying attention to it! We need to start being intentional about reminding ourselves of all the good in our lives. Get a list going, write it on a whiteboard, slap some sticky-notes around the house, write it on your phone. Do whatever you must to remind yourself that there is far more good than it might seem. Then, take some time at the end of each day to remind yourself that today was a good day. It may not have been perfect, but it wasn’t a disaster. Keep a tally of good days and draw upon this when the truly dark days do arrive. I believe that you will find those bad days a little more bearable than you might have thought. 

And here’s the thing: this actually helps make your highs higher as well. If you remind yourself of your successes, then your successes will be what you focus on! It’s an entirely different experience when you take the time to celebrate your good days. It immortalizes them in the book of your history, making them harder to ignore because it has been forever engraved in your memory. So write it down when you have a good day at work! Take yourself out to dinner when you get that promotion! Never let yourself forget all the good fortune that comes your way. Because then, when darkness strikes and night falls, you will have them stored up like fireflies in a jar. They will be there glowing for you when you need them most, and you will be grateful that you prepared for the inevitable. 

Until next time

May Peace be your guide.