“I thought that I would have a great day – and it was. I thought the day would be awful, and it was. What I think seems to make things happen. From now on I will focus on the great things.” JF
I get up early to work out. I can’t break away during the day and am too tired at night to even consider it. So I am up and out of the house before the sun is up.
My workout facility is housed in a local hospital, so despite the hour, it is always busy. Because I am there at about the same time each day, I generally see the same faces in the hallway. This is where I meet James.
James delivers supplies around the hospital. Some days he is delivering towels to the different departments, other times he pushes a cart with boxes of things. Regardless of the day, time or what he is doing, James smiles and greets everyone as they walk by.
Always fascinated by how people find and live their greatness and create their happiness, I asked James one day why he was so upbeat. He smiled and told me that each day he decides how he wants his day to be, thinks about it, and then he makes it happen. And he has been doing it for thirty years.
I smiled back, pleased for the lesson. Life is our choice – or, how we live and how happy we allow ourselves to be, are our choice. We can allow the situations of life to take us down. It’s a choice. We can tell ourselves we are upset, unhappy and disappointed. It’s a choice. We can look at others and blame them for what is not right in our lives – our families, our government, our neighbors…It’s a choice.
Or we can realize that the very fact of waking each morning and receiving the gift of inventing another day of life is a reason to be happy. We can choose to find great things in our lives. And we can change our entire outlook and therefore our days by deciding ahead how we want our day to be.
When James and I end our conversations, I generally add “have a good day.” He always responds, “May you have a better one.” As good as his day is, because he chooses it to be, he always wishes mine to be even better. He knows that by wishing this, I’ll think about it. And if I think about it, I can make it happen. Pretty wise for guy moving supplies around a hospital. It is always a powerful way to start my day.
Please share this with someone who can benefit from it. Be sure to check out more great life wisdom in my book, The Greatness Zone, and in A Special Gift by a great friend of mine, Rob McBride. Both are available at Amazon.com.
