Forced positivity has always made me deeply uncomfortable. “Smile!” “Just look on the bright side!” “It’s not that bad.”

Unfortunately, when you are feeling badly, those apparently well-meaning phrases can feel like a jab in your side. Not only do you feel down, but now you feel guilty for feeling down!

For me, I appreciate practical approaches to feeling positive. One lesson I’ve learned over the years is finding bright spots, literally and figuratively.

Literally speaking, finding a bright spot means getting outdoors and being in the sunlight. Being outside is a natural mood lifter. A friend of mine swears by this simple technique: look up. Look up into the sky for a moment or two. He believes it “opens up your mind and frees your spirit. It reminds you that your problems are small in relation to the vastness of the sky.”

Figuratively, finding a bright spot means noticing the smallest of things that lifts your spirits. Today, I saw a mimosa tree in bloom. The pink was so vibrant and eye-catching. Staring at it for a moment was like looking at a work of art.

Or perhaps its a positive interaction, albeit brief, with a person throughout your day; like a cashier or a passerby who smiles. If you take that moment in, for all it’s worth, you’ll be surprised at how much power a simple and seemingly meaningless interaction holds.

So find some bright spots today. They aren’t hard to find - they’re everywhere. But more importantly, take one moment to recognize that it lifted your spirits, even slightly.

by Beth Mann

Tekapo, NZ - a village among the stars

A touching story about one girl’s vision to make many children happy:

Ana’s Vision

Okay, I had a contest yesterday. I didn’t have the chance to post our Positive Quote Wednesday. So here you have it: Positive Quote Thursday.
I didn’t win the contest…at all! So today, admittedly self-involved, I’m posting quotes on losing. We’ve all been there, right?

A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.
Billie Jean King

A good balance of winning and losing is important. If you just win all the time, you won’t get anything out of it; having some tough losses can be really important.
Andrew Shue

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.
George Borrow

About the only time losing is more fun than winning is when you’re fighting temptation.
Tom Wilson

As I said, I began losing confidence in my instincts, which is tough and very bad for an instinctive person.
Kim Novak

Bambi has a profound effect on children because it’s about losing your mother.
Christine Baranski

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.
Jackie Robinson

Being a decathlete is like having ten girlfriends. You have to love them all, and you can’t afford losing one.
Daley Thompson

Being an only child and losing both my parents at an early age, I have found that the friends I have made over the years are the people who help me get through life, good times and bad.
Fannie Flagg

Bjorn was a different breed, I threw my best material at him, but he would never smile, but that added to the charm when he played me and Mac. We were going nuts and losing our mind and he was sitting back like he was on a Sunday stroll.
Jimmy Connors

Extremely strong, effective, tenacious, and powerful political networks can be built when you fight losing battles as well as when you win.
Patricia Ireland

For myself, losing is not coming second. It’s getting out of the water knowing you could have done better. For myself, I have won every race I’ve been in.

Ian Thorpe

I also think stress is related to control. When you’re in charge of your life, you tend to not care about losing control of things that don’t really matter like traffic jams.
Marilu Henner

I don’t gamble, because winning a hundred dollars doesn’t give me great pleasure. But losing a hundred dollars pisses me off.
Alex Trebek

I have no fear of losing my life - if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it.
Steve Irwin

Follow your bliss. It’s been said time and time again. This artist didn’t need to hear it, he simply did it. And the payoff has been pretty outstanding!

Willard Wigan never meant for his art to become a business.

In fact, he never really set out to be an artist; the vocation found him as he was hiding from the real world at 5 years old.

Now 53, Mr. Wigan is renowned for his “micro-sculptures,” ultra-miniature works in a rare genre he helped create. He makes the minutest of statuettes, fitting them in a needle’s eye or fixing them atop a pin head. He carves figures into matchsticks and puts lipstick and clothes on dead houseflies. In short, he takes life-size ideas and characters and shrinks them to a “molecular level.”

These uniquely small works, a sampling of which is currently on display at the Atlanta Art Gallery in Buckhead, fetch high-profile buyers at big prices. During an interview in February, Mr. Wigan said he was working on a commissioned sculpture that would bring seven-foot-tall basketball star Shaquille O’Neal down to nano size.

England’s Prince Charles, musician Elton John, boxer Mike Tyson and “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell all own pieces of Mr. Wigan’s work, which range in price from $35,000 to upwards of $100,000. David Lloyd, the former British tennis player, owns 72 pieces, almost half of Mr. Wigan’s total output of about 200.

Though his work has made him a millionaire, Mr. Wigan doesn’t do it for the money.

“If I wasn’t going to get paid for it, I’d still do it,” he said. “It’s like telling someone who plays basketball they won’t get paid. They’ll still do it. You do what you love.”

Source: GlobalAtlanta

I had a conversation with my friend yesterday. We were talking about an upcoming competition for women. She believed that women weren’t as competitive as men. I believe they’re often discouraged in sports, with not nearly the attention men receive. Then I read about these women today. Guess they’re skating through the glass ceiling!

Cammi Granato (first photo) and Angela James

TORONTO (AP) — The Hockey Hall of Fame is no longer just for male inductees.

Cammi Granato and Angela James changed that on Tuesday when they became the first women elected to be enshrined in Toronto. Along with former NHL All-Star Dino Ciccarelli, Granato and James will go in as part of the players category during an induction ceremony in November.

Longtime Red Wings executive Jimmy Devellano and the late Daryl (Doc) Seaman — a founding owner of the Calgary Flames — were elected as builders.

While women had always been eligible for induction, the Hall made it easier for them to be voted in when it established a women’s subcategory this year.

Up to four male players are eligible for induction annually, but only Ciccarelli was voted in Tuesday. Eric Lindros and Joe Nieuwendyk were potential contenders among NHL players in their first year of eligibility that didn’t receive enough support.

Women were given their own player category this year, and James and Granato filled the maximum of two female inductees per year.

“This is a day I never really thought would ever happen,” James said. “I’m really honored to represent the female hockey players from all over the world.”

Granato played on the U.S. women’s hockey team for 15 years and led the club to a gold medal at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Her brother, Tony, played and coached in the NHL.

“I dreamed of being in the NHL my entire life, and this certainly makes up for those dreams,” Granato said. “Being amongst the first women to play at college and later at the Olympics, it certainly was worthwhile being a hockey pioneer.”

Sometimes there seems so little of it. Sometimes all it takes is a little.

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God - the rest will be given.
Mother Teresa

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
Albert Einstein

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
Maya Angelou

Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.
Mohandas Gandhi

The fact that you are willing to say, “I do not understand, and it is fine,” is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.
Wayne Dyer

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Kahlil Gibran

To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.
Tony Robbins

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Understanding is a two-way street.
Eleanor Roosevelt

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
Helen Keller

The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.
Lao Tzu

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Understanding can overcome any situation, however mysterious or insurmountable it may appear to be.
Norman Vincent Peale

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.
Plato

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?
Pablo Picasso

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
Erma Bombeck

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
Carl Sagan

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Carl Sagan

I want a man who’s kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?
Zsa Zsa Gabor

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Albert Camus

Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.
Margaret Thatcher

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
Stephen Hawking

It isn’t until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control.
Oprah Winfrey

People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
Soren Kierkegaard

I don’t know about you but Monday can be a tricky day for me. I don’t leap back into work mode. Instead, I kind of creep there. Mainly, I feel a little low energy. Luckily a friend sent me this article on ways to boost your energy. Strangely, it doesn’t include coffee!

1. Go outside into the sunlight; light deprivation is one reason that people feel tired. Research suggests that light stimulates brain chemicals that improve mood. For an extra boost, get your sunlight first thing in the morning. And while you’re outside…

2. Go for a brisk walk. One study found that even a ten-minute walk was enough to supply a feeling of energy and decreased tension.

3. Act with energy. We think we ACT because of the way we FEEL, but often we FEEL because of the way we ACT. Trick yourself into feeling energetic by moving more quickly, pacing while you talk on the phone, and putting more energy into your voice.

4. Listen to your favorite upbeat song. Hearing stimulating music gives an instant lift and is one of the quickest, most reliable ways to affect your mood and energy level. I’m always surprised by the effectiveness of this strategy.

5. Talk to an energetic friend. Not only do we gain energy from interacting with other people, we also – in what’s called emotional contagion — “catch” their emotions. Instead of infecting others with your draggy mood, try to lift yourself by catching the energy of a boisterous friend.

6. Tackle an item on your to-do list. Unfinished tasks weigh us down. So if you feel bad about never having had a skin-cancer check, or not having completed an over-due report, or not having faced this month’s bills, force yourself to tackle one thing that’s nagging you. It’s tough, but you will feel a HUGE rush of energy when you cross it off your list.

7. Clean up. I’m not sure why tidying makes such a huge difference, but when I feel like I can’t face the day, I just tidy up my desk, and I perk right up.

8. Eat — if you’re hungry. If you’re actually hungry, eating makes a huge difference to your energy. Both my children become very droopy and crabby when hungry, and I’ve learned the hard way to pay close attention to this; I suffer from it myself. During the workday, my husband will go far too long without eating, so I try to remind him to eat enough, as well. However, it can be tempting to eat a snack to try to get an energy boost even when you’re not hungry. If food isn’t the problem, other strategies to boost your energy may be healthier.

“Exuberance is beauty,” William Blake wrote, and it’s surprising how much sheer energy level can affect the quality of the happiness of a day.

Source: Happiness Project

This summer, my garden has provided me with such pleasure. I’m not a great gardener. Heck, I’m not even a good gardener. But somehow, herbs managed to grow as well as some carrots, tomatoes and…weeds. Lots of weeds. Here’s a young girl who took her gardening a bit more seriously:

Alexandra Reau, of Petersburg, Mich., tended to her rainbow chard.

Lawn mowing and baby-sitting are standard summer jobs for the enterprising teenager. Alexandra Reau, who is 14, combines a little bit of each: last year, she asked her dad to dig up a half acre of their lawn in rural Petersburg, Mich., so she could farm. Now in its second season, her Garden to Go C.S.A. (community-supported agriculture) grows for 14 members, who pay $100 to $175 for two months of just-picked vegetables and herbs.

While her peers are hanging out at Molly’s Mystic Freeze and working out the moves to that Miley Cyrus video, she’s flicking potato-beetle larvae off of leaves in her V-neck T-shirt and denim capris, a barrette keeping her hair out of her demurely made-up eyes. Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?
Read more at The New York Times

Creative potential abounds, even in the most unlikely situations. One would think a boy with a terminal illness would not have the energy, let alone the know-how, to produce such sophisticated and impressive artwork. It reminds us: we are all creative. Convince yourself otherwise and you won’t produce. Allow your inner child to express and you may have the next Picasso:

A terminally ill boy who was not expected to live past six-months-old, has stunned doctors by surviving and holding his own art exhibition.

Leo Haines, aged five, was born with cerebral palsy and a terminal condition affecting his lungs and heart.

Doctors told his mother Marianna Haines, 26, that little Leo would die in his first year. But his fighting spirit saw him through and after spending his first brithday in hospital, Leo was able to move home.

The talented young artist, from Taunton Somerset, England, began painting alongside his grandmother Marianna Thomas, who quickly recognised his talent.

Leo now has 40 unique works, reminiscent of the American abstract artist Jackson Pollock, featuring in their very own art exhibition where they are being sold for charity.

His grandfather, Brian Thomas, 59, said: ‘My wife, his grandmother, is a well-known local artist and it started with Leo joining in, basically uninvited, into her work.

‘So she used to get him a canvas and set him up with paints on the floor and it just went from there.

Artistic Leo, pictured here aged 3, is able to concentrate on his work for over an hour at a time

‘It began by getting him to recognise different colours and mixtures and shapes. Now it is his favourite pastime.

‘I suppose you’d call them impressionism - they’re definitely inspired by his choice of colours, and I think he’s got a very good choice in colours.

‘And they’re really quite good. The first day of the exhibition a man came in and got halfway down the wall and turned to me and asked, ‘Are you Leo?’ - quite seriously.

‘He thought they’d been painted by an adult, and I pointed him to the other wall which tells Leo’s story. He immediately bought a painting. We’ve got about 40 in the exhibition, and they represent two years of Leo’s work.’

Leo was born with cerebral palsy and terminal pulmonary vein stenosis, a condition that means the veins running from his heart to his lungs will become eventually blocked, killing him.

Doctors told his mother, a care assistant from Taunton, Somerset, he was unlikely to survive past six months old, and in the first year of his life Leo’s family was told nine times to prepare for the worst.

But Leo, who suffers from intermittent deafness, battled through and eventually moved home, where he developed a fascination for art as part of therapy to help him communicate.

Now he creates dazzling abstract works full of feeling with sweeping colours on black backgrounds.

Leo’s grandfather, a retired electronics and communications worker, added: ‘Amongst his biggest problems is the ability to communicate because he has cerebral palsy.

Little Leo’s work has been likened to Jackson Pollock’s paintings such as ‘Number 17, 1949′ pictured

‘One of the ways we actually got him to communicate is through activities - painting is one of those things that he can do.

‘My wife’s taught him a sort-of no boundaries approach. It has been great for Leo - it’s got him communicating. He has at least three sessions a week, and in the winter four or five.

‘Some children of his age would not concentrate for more than 15 minutes, but he loves painting so much he can be absorbed for an hour and a half.’

Source: Daily Mail UK

Just the other day a friend told me about an argument he had with a good friend. He was distraught about it and didn’t know what to do. Unfortunately, his friend didn’t want to talk about it with him - and didn’t want to talk to him - which only furthered his upset.

The only advice I could come up with had to do with the concept of acceptance: there are certain situations in life that can leave us feeling horribly in limbo. Sometimes all we can do is accept that awkward space. And let it be.

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy and sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering I rush to them. They will give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resilience to push on.

- Helen Hayes

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

- Carl Rogers

Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

- Madeleine L’Engle

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.

- D. H. Lawrence

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity…. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.

- Melodie Beattie

Perhaps the most important thing we can undertake toward the reduction of fear is to make it easier for people to accept themselves, to like themselves.

- Bonaro W. Overstreet

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

I accept the universe!

(Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reported response: “By God, she’d better!”)

- Margaret Fuller

Ralph Waldo Emerson