Grumpy is only cute if you’re a cartoon!

  “Our attitude towards life determines life’s attitude towards us.” — John N. Mitchell With all of life’s typical stresses, work, finance, health, children, traffic, tragedies and so on, it is often hard to maintain a good attitude. I mean, how could you? There’s so much going on in the world around us that the mind can not even process. Some of us may have a daily routine and don’t anticipate or want to anticipate any disruption. Disruptions come in all sorts of forms, some mentioned above. It is when our “plan” has a punctured whole right in the middle of it. How do we react? Could these disruptions ruin an overall perfectly good day?  How do we recover?  What could we and others benefit from a more positive attitude? On my way to work today, not only was traffic horrendous but I had NO gas. Stop and go traffic does not, in any way, help with a tank running on fumes. Barely making it to work, barely meaning, putt putting (sound of car) my way into work, I was already ten minutes late and missed an important meeting that was scheduled one week prior. Could this day get any worse?! … Yes. As the day continued, I had a significant amount of guests upset because their room was not ready for them to check into because of a sold out night we had prior. Oh yes… I forgot to mention, these are customers that gamble 500K or more in the casino. Could this day get any worse?! … Of course it can, on the way home I ran out of gas!  If this isn’t annoying I don’t know what is. I was having a perfectly good day until all these miscellaneous situations occurred with a motive to ruin my day! Why me? I am a peaceful person with an honest existence who believes in respect for all. Why must I receive such karma? “Attitude: (noun) manner, disposition, feeling, position, etc., with regard to a person, place or thing; tendency or orientation, especially of the mind.” If this is true, why do we give any of these situations so much power? As much as I thought I had an overall “good” attitude, the above thoughts prove otherwise. There is no need to find an answer for everything negative that happens. Especially to think I was special enough to receive such luck. Out of the 6 billion people that occupy this earth, I was the “chosen” one. The same way the body tries to cheats while working out, finding the easiest way to do exercises, the mind does the same by blaming situations for our reactions. Instead of accepting circumstances for what they are, we find every way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Recovery from this type of attitude however, is very difficult and takes a significant amount of attention. Just like quitting anything that you have always been use to doing. It requires you to catch yourself in the action acknowledging every irritation, frustration, and disappointments which almost always ends up in …well… more frustration. Life is ironic! This type of frustration is good though! At some point you will learn that these types of feelings are no fun and your mind will learn to adjust accordingly. Treat your mind as you would a muscle. train it to think positively. On this road to discovery, you will soon learn that thinking negatively and only focusing on getting answers that will not change the current situation only limits the possibility of finding real solutions. When your mind is open and adaptable, real answers will appear. Your day will also become significantly better because you will not allow little disruptions create a barrier to your  happiness. Happiness is positive, and positivity naturally shines a bright light to those that surround you. You could be that ONE person that makes the disruption for others disappear. If you can do it for one person, you could do it for many. There’s plenty of “good attitude” to go around.