12.3.14

Positivity is a choice

At any moment of your life, you can look back at your previous actions and attitudes and realize that you've evolved. If this is true, it also means that someday you will look back on this time and dissect your own current views as a more evolved creature. Sort of like how mankind probably isn't the genetic peak of primates even if current man thinks it is.

At any time, there's good and bad. At any time, positivity is a choice and negativity is a choice. Inaction is a choice. Doing is a choice. In my current "evolved state", I can look at times where I choose negativity and choose to be inactive. One night in college I was so down, my sister had driven up to school to surprise me with a visit and I didn't answer the door even though I had a feeling it was her. She was with her boyfriend at the time, and they were already up in the area for a soccer game, so I didn't feel guilty about wasting a bunch of their time. I just felt like being alone and feeling bad for me, rather than seeing someone who cared about me.

There's more going on in life than ever, and I've probably said that at every time of my life other than one very lazy summer in college. I have a job that takes 8-10 hours every day or more, two young children, a house to maintain, a very tired spouse having a rough year at her job and a bunch of side projects including attempting to write a GOOD manuscript and trying to up my daily exercises to keep my weight at a good level and strengthen my core now that I have a spondylolisthesis diagnosis. I feel like the low person on the proverbial total pole at home, at work and in my family. I've probably had to work harder for that I have than any of my friends or siblings or cousins, and yet I've made it where I am. That feeling of being "less" than everyone else, having to work harder, certainly comes from an upbringing of living in a land of entitlement and having nothing, living with one parent and having very few friends as a child. It was a motivator. It was a choice - to motivate me. Anger turned into progress, into accomplishment. I can't say that it was a healthy way to motivate myself to work out two hours a day or turn out 10 newspaper articles a week on the side while holding down a job and going to school. Now I can look back at those times of my life where I used the "anger" to motivate myself, rather than to make myself "feel bad about me", as times I succeeded.

I'm not a resolution guy, but if I was, mine from now on would to choose positivity. During this current time there is so much to be happy for - working in baseball, something I would have died to do when I was a kid, having two really unique, intelligent children, having some free time to do things I really like to do. There are pretty upsetting things too, but there's no need to run down that laundry list because they don't outweigh the good things. I've heard people who went through a hell of a lot worse, let alone people who have to worry about where they will sleep at night or whether or not they will find clean water, food and clothing.

Maybe this is the most important thing you'll read in my writing - Positivity is a choice... Choose wisely.

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