Autumn has arrived on the calendar, but here in Texas, it’s still Summer … I saw pumpkins outside my grocery store today literally getting sunburned! I feel like Rapunzel needing to let down my long hair, but it’s just too hot to do that.
This is my favorite time of year because now until the end of the year, it’s full of football, festivals (Oktoberfest, the State Fair of Texas, pumpkin patches, art festivals, etc.), celebrations (homecomings, my birthday, Halloween/Harvest, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s) and the temperature loses its oppressive heat and eventually, slowly becomes comfortable. Waiting for that to happen is the hard part. (I wrote on social media recently that I was having trouble waiting for things to happen.)
I love seasons because when one becomes too much to deal with or boring, you know a change will most definitely be coming (unless you live in a place like Southern California where it’s hot year-round, or at least it was the semester I was in graduate school there … I was rummaging through my closet on Thanksgiving Day to find a sleeveless shirt to wear in the 90-degree heat while eating my turkey dinner — not fun for me!)
My pastor outside Nashville once said, “Some people are seasonal people, and some people are meant to be in your life for the long-term.” At the time, that statement hurt me. I realize now, almost two decades later, that I wasn’t hurt. I was offended — that’s much worse in my book because being offended is a choice we each make. In the last almost 20 years, I’ve watched the revolving door of people walk in and out of my life. Some of them were supposed to be forever friends and family. I had to learn the hard lesson that even those you love the most and are closest to can choose to leave. When this happens, your season changes.
These changes can be difficult, but they don’t have to be. It’s all in our perception. We can choose how we view events in our lives. I believe three of the most important tools for dealing with change and new seasons are optimism, joy and gratitude.
The glass is half FULL
William James put it best, “It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.”
You’ll get what you look for. If you’re looking for misery, you will find it. If you are looking for beauty, you will find that, too. The great thing about it is that YOU get to decide what you want to look for. Yes, change can be crappy. It can — and usually is — full of difficult moments, but it can also have beautiful moments, too. I think the reason we don’t see or focus on the beauty is because there are typically more negatives in a situation to take our attention away from the positives.
When I was studying Marriage & Family Therapy in graduate school, I came across a quote from Gary Zukav in our textbook Culturally Competent Counseling, “Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.”
Think about the gold miners during the gold rush. Did they dip their pans in the water and pull them out full of gold? No! They were lucky to find a small nugget, but that small nugget was worth a ton of money and all the trouble it took to find it.
We create our reality, and reframing negative events to see the good in them is a great practice to put into action so that, over time, it becomes automatic. When you catch yourself having negative thoughts, redirect them and encourage yourself. Look for the beauty in the change, even if it’s tiny.
“When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so, he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, ‘You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!’” Romans 4:18 (MSG).
CHOOSING joy/happiness
This year, I’ve seen an explosion of online personalities talking about happiness. It became a buzzword a few months ago with CEO of VaynerMedia, Gary Vee (Vaynerchuk) talking about it on social media. Then all these other content creators followed suit bombarding my inbox and social media feeds with their pitches on why I needed to buy their online courses to learn to be happy.
While Gary Vee is usually the trendsetter, it was ME who began talking about joy and happiness with blog posts in 2014, and I wrote a newspaper article about it in 2006. There’s a lot of scientific research to show that being happy and having joy in your life will not only make you feel better, but it can enhance your health and longevity.
Here’s the thing: Happiness is an inside job. It isn’t something you find externally. It’s taken me more than four decades to realize this. (I’m working on a book about being happy in which I take you on my journey of regaining my joy/happiness … Stay tuned for information on that!)
This meme really sums it up, “I am in charge of how I feel, and today I am choosing happiness.” You have the power to be happy or miserable. The choice is up to you.
Being grateful for EVERYTHING
I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll continue to say it: I believe that one of the greatest traits of a princess (anyone resonating on a higher frequency) is gratitude. What is gratitude? Webster Illustrated Contemporary Dictionary defines gratitude and grateful as “A feeling of thankfulness; having or expressing gratitude, thankful; affording gratification (the act of gratitude or the state of being gratified).”
“Thank [God] in everything [no matter what the circumstances may be, be thankful and give thanks], for this is the will of God for you [who are] in Christ Jesus [the Revealer and Mediator of that will],” 1 Thessalonians 5:18 (Amplified Bible).
The bad things will all work out for your good — maybe not immediately, but eventually you will see that what looked like a devastating storm actually gave you the chance to rebuild your life into the dream house you’ve always wanted.
I was watching one of my favorite movies The Lake House recently and was reminded of a song I loved as a little girl by Carole King called It’s too late. I really love the lines of the last verse:
There will be good times again for me and you, but we just can’t stay together. Can’t you feel it too? Still I’m glad for what we had and how I once loved you. But it’s too late baby. Now it’s too late. Though we really did try to make it. Something inside has died and I can’t hide and I just can’t fake it. No, no, no …
Even though she’s singing about the ending of a relationship, I love how she focuses on the gratitude she has for the experience. There is beauty in every experience — even the bad ones that devastate us and bring us to our knees. We have to look for it.
“When something ends it seems like the end of something. Consider that the ending of it was actually part of the process of something new beginning,” wrote Hemal Radi.
How can you put optimism, joy/happiness and gratitude into practice during the changing seasons in your own life?
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