afordrunning

It’s no surprise that there is a tremendous amount of negative news out there today and because of it I have decided to shift my lifestyle. Yes, I am ready to become someone else, altogether and adopt a Positive Alternative Lifestyle. It’s a difficult decision for sure, flipping over to be a P.A.L. It is so much easier to maintain the status quo and just be negative with everyone else.

Bad news hits and what do you do, rollover like a dog, cover your head with a pillow, start diving toward the end of a bottle, or turn to your faith and pray that you are saved from it all? Any way you start coping with your own set of circumstances will not determine your eventual outcome nearly as much as your attitude during the process. If you go high, or you go low – you will only gain or get through the hard times based on WHY you choose to do what you did.

So, with some difficulty, I am trying to adopt a P.A.L. not as a coping mechanism, but as a lifting device. Sure, it’s harder to do, being so much easier to bitch and moan with the lot of them, but I think it will bring me and those around me up quicker so we can look around, stop focusing on our problems and find solutions that aid in recovery.

Somewhere – something incredible is waiting for you

Somewhere – someone is waiting to be loved

Somewhere – an old friend will be waiting for you to arrive.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about some activities of my past…some of them good, some of them bad. Some of them business-related others personal. But, I’ve been thinking about my past not as a fond point, but one of interest because in many ways it has become an anchor to me. 

The good aspect of an anchor as a device is that it keeps your ship static in turbulent times and those moments of needed rest. The harsh reality using the anchor as a metaphor is that it limits your ability to leave your current position and move on. 

I’m sure we all have good and bad in our past, and while I have stated before that Your Past Never Leaves, I am a firm believer that your recent past hinders your near future in so much as you keep it in your heart. The same set of past events that have provided me so much security are also the elements that are slowly forming the choking vines around my ankles. How do I try to break the anchor that holds?

1. Drive in the counter-direction and see where that might take me.

2. Move – physically forcing myself to run, bike, walk, crawl – and see the world through that perspective.

3. Relax – rome wasn’t built in a day but it only took 6 days and 7 nights to burn, so I have some time.

4. Count your success and your mistakes – I tend to look at the good things I’ve done and count them all as genius, but forget to count the turds I’ve developed over the same period. Often they weight alarmingly close to the same.

These simple four steps begin to assess the reality behind my desire to move – and give it gives me the awareness that I probably wasn’t all that safe with my anchor to begin with.

In this time of financial failures, setbacks, get backs, and bailouts we need some good news to break us out of our collective funks. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear the story we wanted will come the way we think we need. Time to reevaluate our happiness quotient. 

Instead of looking for good news – I would like to be positive news for others. Instead of picking myself up by the bootstraps, I think I will just get better about periods of low and high. Take the joy from the peaks, and the comfort from the valleys that this is just life. No reason to be overwhelmed by something that isn’t really mine to begin with.