BE THE CHANGE YOU WISH TO SEE

There are two ways of spreading the light, you can be the candle or the mirror that reflects it said Edith Wharton.

By now, most of you know that I believe that we can ‘be the change we wish to see in the world’. The person who was quoted believed it too.

Since we’ve got a New Year to work with, many of us, are trying to renew ourselves by shoring up our resolve to make it a good one.

Some of us still make Resolutions. The bravest among us write them down. Not me. I am just glad that I smiled a lot more in 2014 and turned many lacklustre or potential bad days around.

You turn a potential bad day around by deciding not to let a generally bad start or lateness or some early upset carry on into the rest of your day. This is not always easy, I admit, but it is important to your health and well being.

Last year I thought about something that happens to all of us and wrote about it in an essay I called NOTHING TO DO WITH ME. In it I thought about how someone having a bad day can potentially pass it on to everyone they meet that day.

I am not innocent of this and, in fact, had to give myself a TIME OUT a couple of days before Christmas. Just because I was feeling stressed didn’t mean that everyone I met deserved to get it from me.

So often what is happening around us is just like this, nothing much to do with you. However, it is almost too easy to pick up someone else’s vibes and pass them on.

Unfortunately Misery does love Company. Unlike Smiling, which is often addictive and contagious in a good way; Misery instead more often leads to more people stressing out and negativity.

I believe that you can give people a little bit of encouragement and support as you move through your day, even with something as simple as a Smile.

If you initiate positive feelings by being nice, or at the very least courteous to those you meet, you might find that you become a positive force in the lives of the people you meet.

Not all of us can’t do this easily, or often. Sometimes we can’t do it at all because we simply don’t have the energy to spare. However, we can make ourselves aware that our day might be better if we try consciously to reflect the light around us. All it takes is trying to find the positive and adopting it ourselves. This is especially useful when we are having a tough day.

There are times when it seems a steady diet of gloom and doom is coming at us. Whether it comes from watching the news where the slogan is: If it bleeds, it leads; or just from thinking our day, week, month or life in general is bad news; we can begin to think that life and living are a downer.

If you want to do yourself one favour, make one resolution for a better New Year. Determine to remind yourself that you are better off than millions of other people are right at the moment. You know this is true, even if you grudgingly admit this only to yourself.

However, if you are determined to have a bad day, I hope you enjoy it because otherwise, it would be a terrible waste of your time.

Most of us have unfortunately run into someone determined to find something wrong with everyone and everything around them. Rather than looking in their own mirror, they go out and force the rest of us to decide whether we want to enjoy their bad day too.

It’s hard for me to understand anyone who might enjoy being known for ugly negativity and gloom, whether it is how they decide to look or in how they choose to behave. Luckily sometimes we can ignore them and go back to enjoying our own happier lives.

It sometimes makes me wish that everyone who chooses this, would form a group and mingle exclusively among similarly minded miserable people like themselves. Too much to hope for I guess.

Each of us may need to consider what sort of year we want to have, and start to look forward to making it possible. It is possible.

You and I are able to have something to say about whether this is the year we consciously decide to make it happen. The not so wonderful alternative is to begin, and worse still, end this year thinking again that 2015 was ‘same old, same old’.