Today is the Best Day of Your Life

The hills are green, flowers are blooming, neighborhood yards and trees are beginning to show leaves and buds. We typically shake off the winter doldrums at this time of year. But not this year.

This year, people are despondent despite the fine weather and promises from a new administration. This year, hope is a fragile as gas prices are unpredictable. A glimpse at the morning paper can cast a pall over the day. We've developed a kind of doom and gloom outlook. And why not? Things are as bad as they've ever been, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Things are only as bad as you make them out to be. As doctor Seuss says in "Oh the Places You'll Go,"

"You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked...

You can get so confused that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking paceand grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place...
...for people just waiting... Everyone is just waiting.
NO! That's not for you!"

There certainly is an appropriate time for waiting. That's after you've metaphorically tilled and fertilized the soil, planted the seed and provided regular water. So the waiting comes after the work has been done. So the first thing to do is get started. Think about living each day as if it were the best day of your life. There's lots of power in acting "as if." Think about one thing you can do that will give you a positive result and do it. Practice positive thoughts and positive actions. Yesterday, two different people asked me how I was doing. I answered, "Couldn't be better!" Both of these people said, "Wow, what a great answer." Even though I actually could have been better, my response made me and the other people feel really good.

It's easy to focus on the negative, because the negative hurts. The negatives in our lives cause physical or emotional pain. The positives, on the other hand, may be overlooked unless they are extraordinary. This ridiculous truth may have been designed by some omnipotent trickster.

So what can you do about life's positives just slipping by under your radar? How can you remind yourself of all the good things each day brings? What's is the tool or technique you can use to begin to see the upside even on a down day?

Here's one idea: A few years ago I worked with a woman whose license plate said, "YOUGETO." She applied that principal to almost everything. So instead of thinking something like, "Rats, I have to go to work today," change it to "I get to go..." I bet you'll start noticing a difference.