I met a good samaritan on my way to work on Monday. I had wanted to blog about it but hadn’t gotten around to doing it up till now. My dearest mother had given me a lift to work on Monday, but as I was carrying a number of things, I hadn’t noticed that inadvertently, my handphone had slipped out of my bag. I’m not sure when it had fallen on my walk from the car park to the lift to take me up the building, but just when I was nearing the lift, someone hurried up behind me and said “Excuse me, Miss, I think this is yours.”

Lo and behold, it was my phone. My new Nokia E65 which was just about a week old, with all my contacts. Bless that kind soul, the world will be a much better place if everyone was like that.

The days have been great, the weekends have been great. Purpose in life is the key to avoid stagnation and complaining that life just doesn’t get any better.

 Because, because,

 Life is what we make of it. And we become who we believe we are.

 Book of the week: The Leader in You (Dale Carnegie)

I have been away. I have been busy.  The situations we find ourselves faced with everyday is often negative. I was reading a book that challenged the reader to go for a mere 24 hours without uttering a single negative sentence, phrase or word. And it is only when we are actively made privy to these things that we realise what a negative culture we live in today. We complain about everything. The bus is late, the roads are crowded, we don’t have enough money, there isn’t anywhere to sit, the system is too rigid, what with a seemingly endless list.  

At the risk of sounding like a preacher, I must qualify. I haven’t been able to achieve the desired results of that test. It seems our mouths were made to complain, they were made to supposedly point out the things that were inappropriate or unideal about the whole system or society that we live in today. 

Is it not about perspective? Is it not about how we should view things, with the glass half full, instead of half empty?

I was reading a book about attitudes and a few things really struck me. Unable to remember the phrases verbatim, of course, but I will write the essence. It talked about how we like to complain about things, that work is a drag, that there’s nowhere to park, that we have to walk so far from the bus stop to the desired location, and then a few lines just put it all in perspective. 

Be happy when the alarm clock goes off in the morning, because it means you have just woken up alive.Be happy when you find the parking lot furthest from the entrance, because it means you have legs to walk over.Be happy when you have to go to work, because it means you are employed.Be happy when it rains, because it means you have water to drink. 

I could go on, but believe a few suffice to capture the intention. 

It’s basically all about perspective. And yes, it is a process, something every one of us can certainly work towards. After all, would it hurt to be positive? It sure beats being negative, and has a lot more positive repercussions. No one wants to be around someone who is negative, and yet we often don’t realise that we are so many times the cause.