Choosing Health, Wealth and Happiness
From my perspective, tiny houses are all the rage. I see them posted all over the internet, Netflix, Facebook. Why are people (including myself) so fascinated with a house that is smaller than many sheds? I read different measurements that would qualify a house as tiny. Some say under 300 square feet, others say under 150 square feet. Regardless of the actual size, I have seen some beautiful, tiny homes that I just want to reach out and hug!
For those of you who know me, or have been reading my blog over the last few months, you know I typically keep a positive outlook on life. The glass if ½ full, I look for the good in people and in events. When I share my day with my honey, even my bad days, I find at least 1 or 2 good things to share in order to remember it wasn’t 100% bad. I choose to be positive!
The last few days I have been tired, my nerves have felt a bit frayed and I have been feeling under the weather. When I feel like this, it is all too easy to get sucked into the black hole of negativity. One negative thought leads to another into a downward spiral and one bad feeling leads to another. It gets harder and harder to find the positive in any situation. Do you ever feel like that? Do you always feel like that?
Last week my post Getting Energized was about my learning to appreciate that I am not a people person and recognizing that this is OK!. It also got me thinking, what else gets me energized or saps my energy. Everybody is different and what may give me a burst of oomph my drain you to the point of exhausted tears.
Have you ever noticed how some people are talkers? The get energized by conversation and social engagements. They love parties with lots of people and bounce from group to group, easily mingling and interacting with all. These are people people.
I adopted my dog, Fenway, when she was just 4 months old from a shelter in Eastern Massachusetts. She and her siblings had been abandoned in a box by the side of the road. She will turn 8 next month and is starting to turn grey (like me) but she still thinks she is a puppy! She is 25 pounds of pure joy. Continue reading “20 Lessons My Dog is Teaching Me”
Seriously that is what I felt. I could feel myself grinning from ear to ear in what only can be described as pure joy!
So I have a confession to make but don’t tell anyone. I am in the last week of my 49th year on this planet. Yup, I will turn the BIG 50 in May! I remember when my mom turned 50. The neighbors had a little get together for her and someone announced her age. She was mortified. When I was in my 30’s I always joked with my friend’s daughter that I was still a teenager. Then I bought a house and she came to me with a sly smile and said “You can’t be a teenager”. When I asked why she laughed and said “teenager’s don’t buy their own houses”.
I was spending a few minutes on Facebook recently and a friend had posted something about a cardinal spending a lot of time in his yard. He felt it was a visit from his mother who had passed away several months ago. I had never heard of this before so I did what any curious person would do, I promptly forgot about it and went about my day.
My sister (child#1, daughter #1) commented to me the other day that my blog was starting to sound like a self-help book. I took this as a compliment! I used to scorn self-help books, thinking they were just for people who, well needed help. Then I hit a point in my life where I needed help and I turned to the library and a whole shelf of books that offered help. I wanted a change in my life but I didn’t know what to change or how to change, or how I would handle change.
I lot of books offered the same type of advice that sounded a bit like this. Figure out what makes you happy and do more of that. Pretty basic, simple advice that certainly doesn’t sound like rocket science but it pretty powerful all the same. A lot of these books also say follow your passion but I didn’t know what I was passionate about. So I focused on what made me happy. Continue reading “Do What Makes You Happy”
We all have really awesome, amazing days where everything goes according to plan. We check off all of the important items on our to do list, we make the phone calls we have been putting off, we remember it is our turn to cook dinner. We all also have those days where everything we touch seems to break, everything we say seems to hurt feelings, everything we do seems to go wrong. We are all human and this is just part of the human experience.
I have met people throughout my life who take personal responsibility only on those days that go well. They accept credit for the success, they proudly smile and nod their heads at the acknowledgment of a job well 
done. However when it comes to taking responsibility for those bad days where everything goes wrong, they are nowhere to be found. They have excusitis. “It is not my fault”, I’m not the one you are looking for”, “I wasn’t here”, “blame so and so”, “I did my part”. I first came across the term “excusitis” in a book called The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. Don’t you think it is a great word? Continue reading “No Excuses”