The Power of Positive Thinking

I am grateful for my cats! 

Ok, my goal for this blog is to tell funny and maybe touching  anecdotes.  Today, I already need a break to share something that's been on my mind a lot this week. 

A friend of mine started a 30 Day Gratitude Challenge on a closed Facebook group last week.   She asked us each to post daily something we are grateful for. Have you ever tried this?  I highly recommend it!  Reading everyone else's posts makes you think of even more things in your life to be thankful for.  So, today's post is about all I've learned about the power of being grateful, assuming the best in life, and  thinking positively. 

 "Everything will be okay in the end.  If everything is not ok, then it is not the end."    I don't know the source of this quote, but I've been using it for the last year.  I've found it very helpful when dealing with a difficult situation or person. :) 

So, my friends know this about me, I was a teen mom, a single mom.  My daughter was born 10 days after I graduated high school.  If you have never known a teen mom, it is very difficult for everyone involved.  It affects the teen mom's birth family, the teen dad's birth family, and the baby.   So I was a teen mom.  We lived with my family for the first two years.  It was tough on everyone.  When my daughter was 28 months old we got a subsidized apartment. Then things became financially tough.  I was working part time, going to college part time and parenting part time (or so I felt).  Because of a lot of factors, I had a lot of negative thinking going on.  If something good happened to us, such as getting a random child support check, I became very scared that something bad was going to happen any moment to cancel out the wonderful thing that had happened.    This continued for years. 
When my daughter was 7 and I had graduated from college, we followed my parents to Ohio, again living with them until I could find a teaching job.  It was tough on everyone, again. 

Thank goodness we found Kleinman during this time.  Dr. Kleinman, that is.  By this time I had started teaching at a parochial school.  (Yes, they knew I was a former teen mom when they hired me for your legal buffs or conservatives.) Dr. Kleinman is a psychiatrist.  I found him by calling the health insurance company and asking for a referral.  God was looking out for me that day!  What a gift!  He met with my daughter, and he met with me.  One of the first lessons he taught me is that we create what we think.  Because I had spent years, 8 years at this point, dwelling on the negative and worrying about the negative coming to get me, that's what I was creating in my life.  Wow.  I did this to myself?  Wow. 

So, I began stopping myself from doing that.  A random worrisome thought would come in, and I would let it pass and argue against it.  "No, that won't happen, everything will be just fine.  Don't worry."  And sure enough, it was fine.  Within a year of finding Kleinman, we were in our own apartment.  Within another 2 years, I had bought us a condo.  Things continued to improve.  Thank you, Dr. Kleinman! 

Years passed, and I moved to the public schools where I taught a cute little second grade girl who has the same first name as my niece.  I had no idea that years later I would become friends with her mom.   She has become one of my very closest friends, SBBFF for short, and one of my positive thinking mentors.  What SBBFF taught me is how to look at the positive side of things.  When I got rear ended on my way to yoga class, she was grateful I didn't get hurt.  When I got divorced, she went out with me to celebrate my freedom and gifted me with a journal so I had a place to deal with all the feelings.  Because of SBBFF when something unpleasant happens, I complain - I am human afterall - and then I look for the positive to help me through.  What will I learn from this?  Why am I going through this?  There is always a positive, no matter how tiny. 

I've seen this with the 30 Day Gratitude Challenge.  A woman I don't know is in the Facebook Group doing the challenge.  She had a bad injury recently.  At first she had a tough time being positive.  She was in pain, her summer was horribly interupted, she was on pain medicine, unable to do things for herself, and feeling very down.  Maybe even angry.  Then a week into the challenge she was finding the positive.  First she was grateful for neighbors bringing meals and today she posted, "Thankful my daughter continues to check up on me while on vacation. And grateful my PT continues to show improvement. Have a happy sunny day everyone!"  Amazing what a different tone! 

I've seen the same in my life.  The more positive thinking I do.  The more I practice this.  No, it doesn't just come naturally to me.  It might come naturally to some people, but not to me.  The more I practice this, the easier it gets.  The more positive thinking mentors I meet, the easier it gets.  The more I practice, the better my life gets, and the more I grow. 

I'm also one of those girls who reads self help books.  Some that have really helped me with the power of positive thinking are:   I hope they help you. 

 



 Is your glass half empty or half full? 

momcaboodle.com 6/23/2013

Actually, That's a trick question. 

 



lokwi.com 6/23/2013



 

The Bushes are Back :(

The viburnum bushes are back.  They are a challenge to my nextdoor neighbor and myself.  Last year the bushes gave my neighbor a Vietnam flashback. 
I was afraid we'd killed them.  I'm Green. I don't like to kill things.  By the end of last summer there was a sapling from a random tree growing in a giant flower pot on my back deck.  I have no idea which tree it came from (none in the area had the same leaves), but I knew that if I let it grow the roots would crack my giant flower pot that I actually put there for the purpose of flowers.  This summer I used my hedge shears (right) to cut down the tree.  I couldn't pull it out of the pot by the roots so I just chopped.  The entire time I chopped I apologized to it,  "I'm sorry.  You don't deserve to die, you would be a beautiful tree some day, but you grew in the wrong place.  You will die eventually because this pot is too small for a tree." Etc. You get the message.  Hopefully you get me.  Which is why I was worried I had killed the viburnum last year. 

I live in a condo, a townhouse. My nextdoor neighbor and I share a front porch and a sidewalk, and an affection for his little dog who barks until I come out to say hi and pet him. His dog is one of those newer mixed breeds like a yorkiepoo or a shitzpoo or something.  We have twin landscaping on either side of the shared sidewalk. Right in front of our doors we each have a viburnum bush. Who puts a viburnum bush in front of a front door? If you have never seen a

viburnum, they are pretty bushes. They are excellent for a privacy hedge. I am writing this on June 16. They have not been pruned yet  by the landscapers our home owners association (HOA) graciously hires for us for the small (compared to my viburnum bush) monthly fee we pay.
So, as I am writing this the viburnum bush is growing. It is taller than I am. It is at ground level. I am not only on the cement stoop, but also in the house which is up one more step!
Ok, so back to the bush. When you open the front door. The storm door opens out. The door hits the bush. When you walk out the front door you have to walk into the bush to get around the storm door.

My neighbor lives in fear that one night a creepy man will be hiding behind the bush completely unseen when his wife gets home from work, and she would never see him through the bush until it is too late.  That is a scary thought!  On the other hand, I happen to enjoy that when I order something from Amazon no one has any idea there's a package on my porch all day because who could see it through the bush?!

So, last spring I called the HOA and asked to have the bushes trimmed. My neighbor borrowed his brother's electric trimmer. I have what I call a hedgewacker that I got a Big Lots (the hedge shears you saw above). One Sunday afternoon. The hottest, haziest, most humid Sunday afternoon of May I got tired of watching NCIS reruns and grading papers and decided to trim the darn bush. I got out the hedgewacker and apologized to the bush explaining that although this might hurt it was really the equivalent of a haircut and a shave so it would look much better when I finished.
Then I got stupid. I rang my neighbor's doorbell to ask both his opinion and if it was ok if I pruned his bush (ok I have to stop here again. . .I just gotta say every time I type something about the bush I think of the other meaning of bush and my mind giggles like a 12 year old).
So I rang the doorbell not thinking that my neighbor is a man a generation ahead of me. It really bothered him that I was doing all this work while he was watching apocalypse movies. So he came out and used his brother's hedge trimmer.
He hooked it up with an extension cord and got started. When he got hot or tired or saw me with the Power Tool Gleam in my eyes he let me have a turn. In my head I could hear Tim the Toolman Taylor grunt  because I like power tools, too.
So we trimmed and pruned and practically killed the darn viburnum and the burning bushes and evergreen bushes. . . We were a bush trimming duo. We had beaten the landscaping back! We could happily enter and exit our condos, see everyone hiding behind the shrubbery. Monty Python made me love the word shrubbery.  Everyone could see our packages (the ones I order from Amazon, you pervert!) and then we had to clean up the fallen branches. 
Did you know that viburnum bushes have some kind of powdery substance on the stems? Or leaves? Or something? Maybe it just produces that as a defense mechanism, but it was brutal. It went up our noses, down our throats and prickled and burned and itched. I needed a drink. We were both choking on it so so I went into my garage and got us each a bottle of water. I love Ice Mountain!
This is when the flashback happened. If you are a Vietnam Vet thank you for your service, but you should really stop reading now. I don't want to be responsible for another flashback.
The heat, the humidity. The middle of the day, the hottest part of the day, in the middle of a drought on top of the stinging choking dust from the darn bush (yes every time I type darn I really say damn in my head) made my neighbor sit down and say, "I hate the f-ing jungle. I need to teach you not to work in the jungle heat of the day. You don't work in the jungle heat. When I hear liberals singing 'Save the rainforest!' I don't care if you burn them all down. I hate the f-ing jungle."
He was breathing kind of shallow. His skin didn't look good. I was pretty worried about him having a heart attack or picking up a rifle thinking I was Vietcong; one or the other. I just stood quietly, drank my water and listened. In college they do NOT teach you how to handle a hyper conservative neighbor having a Vietnam flashback.
 I've never been to Vietnam. I've been to the jungle, the rainforest, in Costa Rica. La Selva, which actually is the name of the national park and means the jungle in Spanish, is a national park and biological research station.  I fell in love with the rainforest.  Yes, I am one of those liberals wanting to save the rainforest that my nieghbor could do without.  Yet, I could see why my neighbor could hate the jungle. We were there for a day, a few hours really. We got there early and basically went for a walk - a tour. Tour guides walked our group on paved paths through the jungle. We saw where a woman named Nalini lived in a tree studying the canopy. We saw all kinds of plants and animals. You have never seen so many shades of green as exist in the rainforest. It is an amazing and beautiful ecosystem. But. . .
We were covered in Deet. Yes, our environmentalist profs that took us on this trip said this day in this forest we actually needed to use Deet to protect ourselves. I could see why. Even with Deet one man's khaki pants were covered. I happened to notice the polka dotted pants he was wearing. I looked again. His entire butt was covered. Yes, covered in mosquitos. I grew up in Massachusetts. There are some swampy areas there. We used to close our windows every couple of weeks as the mosqito truck came into the neighborhood to spray for mosquitos. Yes, they were bad enough to warrant mass spraying of pesticides up and down the roads in our town, where children lived. Not only did we have a lot of mosquitoes in Massachusetts, they were big and ruthless. Compared to the mosquitoes I'd seen in Cincinnati or upstate New York, where we'd also lived,  Massachusetts mosquitoes were more the size of small birds, than insects. Yet, I had never, ever seen that many mosquitoes. These were big mosquitoes, bigger than the biggest MA ones. These were hungry, bloodthirsty, and completely covered a man's butt!
Also, do you have any idea what that kind of heat and humidity can do to the body?  It saps your strength and its humidity clogs your lungs.  Looking up is tiring.  Turning your head requires conscious effort.  My friend and roommate on the trip suffered heat exhaustion. She thinks she drank too much water and washed our her electrolytes. She ended up sitting with a prof when we went back out after lunch, then crashed back at our cabin later. Sleeping, drinking water with electrolytes thanks to Marco's expert medical advice restored her to health.
While we were staying in that part of Costa Rica near the lowland rainforest, nothing dried. My hair always felt damp and never fully dried after washing it. It dried to damp but never dry, then became sweaty again with any activity.
So, looking at neighbor's hatred of the jungle from the other side, I get it.  We didn't live there for months or years with those vulturous mosquitoes. Only one of us suffered a heat related illness, and it lasted less than 24 hours. None of us were fighting an armed enemy. I can see why he would hate the jungle.
Eventually he closed the door to those memories and we cleaned up and went back into the air conditioning. 

 

Here we are 13 months later.  The HOA did eventually send someone out to trim the bushes in June or July, not long after we had scalped them.  After a 2nd trimming during the heat of summer in a drought year, the bushes did not look like they would make it.  Their leaves were brown, a little burnt looking at the edges. Yet, make it they did.  And they have quadrupled in size.  Maybe the 2 of them conspired against us?  Kind of a, "Trim us, will you?!  Buuhaaawwa!"  Maniacal laugh here.
So, here we are again.  I've called the HOA 3x and sent one email asking them to trim the bushes.  But I think hedge whacker and I are going to be back out there.  Maybe I should choose a day while my neighbor is at work?!