When you wake up every day, you have two choices. You can either be positive or negative; an optimist or a pessimist. I choose to be an optimist. It’s all a matter of perspective. ~ Harvey Mackay
So last week, after traveling for four out of the previous five weeks, being on planes, trains at gatherings and unmasked in more restaurants than I have in years I returned back to California surprisingly healthy. It seems I always pick up a cold while traveling and happily avoided it this time. I returned to work and at that point, five days after returning, I came down with a nasty head cold. This of course means a lot of time sleeping, acquiring a Nyquil addiction and generally just feeling crappy. It also gives you a lot of time just to lay around and think about things. Of course I was annoyed, as I always am when I’m sick because let’s face it, I’ve got shit to do.
One of the things I got to thinking about related to the way I was feeling. While it sucks to be sick I was really grateful that I hadn’t gotten sick while on my vacation. I was really fortunate to have had two really wonderfully relaxing vacations. First for a week on the West Coast and then for two weeks on the East Coast. This was not my typically adventurous vacation, both were pretty mellow, very restorative and just made time for conversation and community.
So while I lay on the couch in misery I had to be pretty happy about the timing of my illness. I also can’t remember the last time I had a bad cold. And that is the crux of the point of this post. While I wasn’t feeling well I had to be happy about my situation. It would have been easy to lay there and fall into the woe is me attitude and be really unhappy. But that’s not the choice I made. And while I’m not Pollyanna enough to think that under any circumstances you can just choose to be happy, I will say that is almost always the case. And I won’t spend anytime writing anything to try and convince you of that, because one of the greatest stories I’ve ever listened to, The Orange, does it so much better than I ever could. I captured it in a post I wrote years ago and it’s the best thing you’ll hear today, this week, this month and likely this year. And if you’ve heard it before, listen to it again, I’ve listened to it dozens of times and every time, it changes my perspective and makes me appreciate life just a little bit more, it’s called:
The Ministry of Happiness 