From The Storyteller
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April 1, 2019, Band Aide
The band aide with battleship pictures is sticking to the back of my hand. There’s no injury. I’m simply using it to help me focus on keeping a positive attitude. Life has dealt one of our children a big chunk of negative, and while I can’t change their circumstance, I’m being encouraged to focus on the possible good that can flow from it. Band aide therapy was not my idea. It came from Alice (not her real name), a very successful business woman a few years my senior. She called it her band aide attitude “magic”. She explained that when she was a child and felt sad, her mother would take a band aide, put it on her arm, and say, “There, now you will feel better”, and she did. She handed me the box of band aides, smiled, taped one to my hand, and left. It worked. As mentioned before, I choose to live my life with a positive attitude. While it’s more enjoyable than a life rooted in negative, it’s not always easy to maintain. Because Alice’s “magic” is not limited to band aides, I’ve developed some of my own. One is never beginning a sentence with “It’s not”. When I start with a negative I never seem to get to positive. Another is reminding myself to “smile” when times are tough. Our moods tend to follow our facial expressions, so smiling is easy “magic” (when I remember). The rock my daughter painted in kindergarten (she is now 40+), my mother’s painting, and rainbows (when available) all contain attitude “magic”. At times when the air seems to be thick with negative, my attitude “magic” is in this simple sentence, “I trust the Planner, so I trust the plan, and I’m a part of the plan, and so are the people I don’t like.” Moral: There’s “magic” everywhere. |