It’s all about attitude, no matter how you slice it.

On the internet forums that I often frequent, there’s often lots of discussion about people’s attitudes. The internet, because of it’s ability to let a person exist anonymously through an on-line I.D., does tend to bring out all the extremes in people – many doing and saying things they’ve never been able to do before the internet came along. And as these things usually go, the bad ones always stick out the most. The analogy I’ve often used in forums is: What happens when you take a roomful of a hundred happily partying people and introduce one angry, attitude-laden drunk? What this does is make it appear that nastiness is far more prevalent than good, but in truth, it is not. And this is true in all things in life. The bad things, although far fewer, do tend to appear to be the majority sometimes. And I think one of the keys to changing one’s life, rather than focusing on the occasional bad things that happen, is to change one’s focus to the better and more pleasant parts of life – to change one’s attitude, if you will. I’ve found, in my travels on the planet, that the angry people, the ones with the bad attitudes are usually the ones that have been drawn into focusing on the negative parts of living – for whatever their reasons.

As an inhabitant of Planet Earth with the other 6 billion or so people living their lives, a typical day’s activities for me is just a series of interactions with all the other things that other people are doing with their day. Control of what happens to me each day is not really something that I’ve ever felt that I’ve had. I could walk out my front door and nothing could happen of note to me today or some guy could try an emergency landing with his broken single-seater airplane down the middle of my street. You just never know. I could meet the most fascinating person I’ve ever met today, by accident in a cashier’s line in the grocery or I could sit at my desk and get a phone call that a close friend has just died. Life does that ... deals it out as it sees fit. And the key, in my opinion, to being happy is attitude – how you receive these things. Even the surprise death of a friend has a ‘way’ of looking at it. Although grief and sadness is intense in times like this, there is also the feelings of reminiscence and intense closeness with that friend as you (naturally) travel back through the past, reliving all the things that brought you close to this person during the times you spent together. Attitude.

Do I believe that I have control over what happens to me ?? ... No, not really. But I definitely believe that I have control over how I’ll react and receive what happens to me. And I believe that I have control over what I put out into the sea of billions of other people and what happens to them because of me.

It’s all about attitude, no matter how you slice it.

D. Berryman

October 14, 2007