LIVING LIFE: Your Sunshine

In such a soggy time of the year, who else would put in a good word for rain, except for the farmer about and yonder who feeds all of us and for all his or her efforts gets stuck in the murky mud of selling carrots and potatoes on the road. But rain is a very good thing and so when we see the black nimbus clouds we should not wear a cold face and start cursing God but instead look for an umbrella or a shade and get on with it. It is just like life. Human nature is such that we have times of joy and times of sorrow, happiness and pain, success and failure, although failure is usually a temporary derailing on the way to success. There are at least two types of people when men and women reach moments when they are low for some reason or the other. In problems, one group of people finds a huge obstacle that cannot be removed. All they think about is how hard the problem is, how unfair the world is to them and how bad their day can get. This group usually fumbles with such a problem and hopes that God can do a miracle and just sweep the problem away. They are such believers in the power of fate and how God has written a storyline of their plan that they, mere mortal humans, cannot alter. The second group is the problem solving group. To these, every cloud has a silver lining. A problem is just a challenge or even an excuse to find a solution. They thrive on challenges and are easily bored by inactivity. The word impossible does not exist in their vocabulary and when they have low times, they think hardest on how best and higher they can rise from their low moments in new peaks of personal achievement. So rain is just not rain. It can be an unnecessary inconvenience to those who want to see the bad side of rain and look for an excuse to skip work while to others it is a blessing in disguise, farmers, umbrella sellers and their ilk. One Anthony J. D’Angelo said that wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine. Some people in the first group who understand that it would be a nice thing to belong to the second group but think it is too much effort that might go to waste.Francesca Reigler disagrees. “Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same.” Someone else said that if you have to eat a frog, make sure you eat a very fat and juicy one. If you want to have an attitude why bother having a miserable attitude towards life, when the effort that goes into making a bad attitude towards life is the same that you will use to have a good attitude? The Eagles in their song “Already Gone” say that ‘So often time it happens, we all live our life in chains, and we never even know we have the key.” The key to your life and its potential is all in you. If you are waiting for someone else to show you how to run your life, you might have to spend your whole life waiting for nothing to happen. Otherwise, I wish you a rainy Sunday! kelviod@yahoo.com