At present I have a broken wrist
which causes the temporary loss of activities that I enjoy.

My injury is healing, which makes my situation temporary,
but all of us experience losses that are permanent.

Some of them are enormous losses, others are small.
People move away or die; relationships and jobs change;
children age, time passes and our own bodies begin wearing out;
favorite stores close; even favorite TV shows are canceled.

When we recognize we have lost something that was valuable to us,
and that it is gone forever, we feel sad.

When we can turn our thoughts to the future
and leave the past behind, 
we have accepted the loss and can get on with our lives.

Hope is the belief that things will get better.
Hope is the antidote to despair.

A positive way of looking at the losses in our lives
is that the loss helps us see more clearly the value of what we have lost.

When we suffer a loss, what remains after the loss
is the essence of that which we have lost.

If we have lost a person through death,
we have lost only the physical sense of that person.
What we will always have within us is the essence of that person.

Or if we have lost something that seems like a part of ourselves,
such as a job or a relationship, or a place etc.,
what remains within us
are all the experiences and memories that we gained
through that work, that relationship, or that location itself. 

                           

Serenity means calmness and tranquality.
The Serenity prayer says:

“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference. “

Some things we can change,
and some things we cannot change.
How do we know the difference?

Recognizing the difference between what we can change
and what we cannot change will make our lives
more peaceful and more productive.

Wisdom is the recognition that our control is limited.
 The only thing that we have any power over
is our own behavior and our own choices.

For Serenity we must Accept that we have no power or control
over the behaviors or the choices of others.

Changing the things we can,
means mustering our Courage to work toward
the difficult task of changing ourselves,
specifically…changing our own attitudes and our own behaviors.

Many of us spend time feeling anxious
about things we cannot change:
things like the economy, the weather, traffic on the freeway,
or the actions of other people who are close to us.

This focus on things that are outside our personal control
drains from us the energy that we need
to make the most of our own personal opportunities.

The Wisdom I’ve found is: 
that Acceptance of this Truth
brings me Serenity and also gives me Courage.

Believing in oneself is simple to understand,
but is difficult to put into practice.

It takes a positive mindset to achieve in life,
and a belief that we can accomplish what we need to do.

To establish confidence that we can achieve our goals.
we sometimes need to ignore what others say.

Other people might tell us that we can’t achieve
a seemingly unreachable task or target.
But if we have belief in ourselves and have decided
to work on achieving a task, success can happen.

 Self-belief…even in times of great desperation…
is what gives us the confidence to put forth the effort
that is necessary to accomplish our goals.
The old fable below illustrates the point.

One day after a day of hard work a donkey was returning home from the field
and suddenly he slipped and fell into a deep well. The donkey started crying
and hearing his cry, the farmer came and tried to pull the donkey
out of the well.

However the donkey was too frightened to even try to climb out,
because he thought he might fall again while being pulled out of the well.
Finally, the exhausted farmer, decided to take his friends’ advice
to leave the donkey in the well and to close up the well
so there would be no more falling incidents.

 The donkey was sad when he heard them discussing the plan.
He had served the farmer for years, and now they were going to kill him
by closing the well. He lost all hope.

The farmer and his friends started throwing sand into the well
and when the sand started pouring on top of the donkey's body
the donkey realized he was about to die.
But the donkey then chose to use this hardship as an opportunity,
and started jumping over the sand each time it was thrown into the well.
As the sand piled up, the donkey rose to the top of the well
where he was able to climb out. This made everyone very happy.

The moral of this fable is that when the donkey believed in himself
enough to make the effort, he used his last opportunity to solve his problem.

During my endless search for the Positive,
it recently occurred to me ...

One great thing about using a computer software
food journal similar to DietPower is
that even if one didn't want to count calories or control portions,

...someday in the future, you could still be able to look back
at your personal data, and learn your accurate food amounts,
nutritional values and/or your eating patterns.

I have been making daily food entries into my DietPower journal for the past 6 years,
and I can access any day's food information from the past 6 years.

For Example, suppose I wanted to know exactly what and how much I ate
every Christmas Day or every Birthday or every Vacation for the past 6 years,
I can pull that data up and compare it.

I find this ability to access personal information to be very compelling. 

 There is some type of technical computer code glitch between Internet Explorer, DietHobby,
and YouTube that occasionally keeps a daily blog from working properly with embedded videos. 

So, when this occurs while I'm posting an article,
I've decided to deal with it by posting that video as a second separate blog,
as I did here today.

I call it living in the solution, not the problem.