I’m not much of a movie buff
anymore. These days, I don’t even go out to a movie theatre except on rare
occasions. I don’t watch many movies at home, either. In fact, my daughter was
astonished when I told her that, this weekend just past I watched two movies,
one on Friday night and one on Saturday: Arrival, and Trolls. Thinking about
this past weekend has brought to mind those times long ago when the kids were
younger, and our weekends completely predictable. Every Friday, we’d head to
Blockbuster, and pick out four, or sometimes six movies as our weekend
entertainment. Every once in a while, there would even be snacks and soda to go
along with those movies.
Then, for the next two nights,
we’d gather together on the sofa (the boys liked the floor) and watch those
movies together. That was family time for us, and those times were golden. They
inevitably led to our other great family time, Sunday Morning in Mom and Dad’s
Bed. The kids would pile on, usually waking us up, and we’d talk and laugh,
tickle and snuggle and read stories. At the time of our lives when we had
precious little money to spare, we did what we could to promote family
unity.
Supper time, our other great
instance of family time, was always all five of us at the kitchen table, every
night, together. It was a time of communion, with the television off. You can be
certain if cell phones existed then, they’d have been off and away from the
table as well—as ours are now when we sit down to eat, just the two of
us.
This was our life in those lean
but not so dismal years, according to my own recollections. I don’t doubt the
facts of those memories. It’s possible, of course, that the beauty of them, the
degree to which they were at the time of making them, cherished, might be open
to interpretation. We’re all human, and our memories, our experiences past and
present are inevitably colored by our own perceptions. We all have filters,
built in filters and biases that have been molded and adjusted according to our
own life experiences—and how we’ve reacted to those experiences—through the
years of our lives.
The most vivid example of this
I can give you is something to which I’m certain we can all relate. We all know
at least one optimist who, no matter what, clings to their positive outlook.
Conversely, we all know someone so miserable that they even complain about the
whipped cream and the cherry on top.
It could be said that striking
a balance between those two forces, pessimism and optimism, has been my life’s
work. I’m not naïve enough to believe that life is all sunshine, lollipops and
rainbows, to quote a song from my youth. But it’s not all doom and gloom,
either. I’ve lived long enough to understand that our perceptions have a lot of
power. They have a huge influence on our emotional well being and how we react
to everything we experience.
You might not believe this, but
the reason I focus so much on this topic is because, from my early twenties,
right through my thirties and even into my forties, I really had a crappy
outlook on life. When I would look back on my younger days, or past incidents, I
had a tendency to recall every time I was dissed or disappointed or hurt. It
wasn’t the sunny days I recalled, only the rainy ones; not the joy of a friend’s
company I remembered, but the hurt of that same friend abandoning me.
That I was able to change my
perspective was no mean feat. It required hard work and prayer, which is to say,
I learned to get out of the way, and let God do the heavy lifting on that
one.
Once He opened my eyes to the
fact that having that negative perspective in the first place was the source of
most of my misery and heartache, I finally got on board with mostly looking at
the glass as half full.
That’s why I try so hard to
encourage people to have a positive attitude now. As long as you practice that
tenet, as long as you tell yourself that no matter what happens to you, you’re
going to choose to smile instead of cry, then your emotions will be your friend,
and not your enemy.
And as long as you continue to
choose to be positive, to smile instead of cry and step out on faith instead of
cower in the shadows, then, no matter the minutia of the details, you will have
won.
Love,
Morgan
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