Happy # 118: Find your hopeful, childlike, fearless self.

Where were you when you were 10? More importantly, who were you? What were you doing? What were you thinking? How did you think about your life?

My guess is, with hope in your future.

Recently, a friend who has known me since childhood said he could see the sorrow behind my positive posts on Facebook. He could see me striving to see the good, find the good, and be grateful for everything in my life regardless of what was really going on in my heart. He was right. 

He can see this because he's known me since I was six years old and he knows the adverse background I come from. He saw it. Fully... He knows what I've come through and how hard I've worked to overcome my beginnings and make something different for my life.

I've been reflecting on his words and the power being positive has to create change. 

I've also been giving thought to the words of another friend. This friend said, ten years ago, he was impressed by my ability to take life as it comes to me, gracefully. "Hard won, I'm sure," he said. 

Hard won, indeed. I hadn't thought about myself that way then, but his words made an impact and I've reflected on them several times in the last decade.

These two sentiments have captured my attention with regard to what being positive really means and how being positive works to shape a life. Because it has certainly shaped mine.

What does being positive mean, exactly?

Anyone who reads this blog or follows me on Facebook knows I am working on a Masters of Architecture. It is, by in large, the most difficult thing I've ever done. It is HARD. Every day. And it has been a challenge to find the positive stream of thinking in this difficultly.

But it is the positive stream of thinking that illuminates the opportunity that lies in difficulty. 

Giving thought to the words of my friends, I began reflecting on myself as a ten year old. 

It was 1971. Easily our twentieth-something move, we lived in another small town, and our home was a trailer. All my clothes came from thrift stores. Christmases and birthdays, I just wanted something brand new, that nobody else had ever worn. Never happened. 

One day at school I learned a girl's mother had made the top she was wearing. So, I decided to make myself something new.

I borrowed the pattern from the girl, found fabric in the trailer we lived in, followed the pictures in the pattern to cut out the fabric, sat down at my mother's old sewing machine, and following the pictures in the pattern, taught myself to sew. Ten years old. No fear.

I wasn't afraid to try. I wasn't afraid to start. I wasn't afraid of that sewing machine, and it didn't matter to me that I didn't know how. I wasn't afraid of the machine, or the process.

I had childlike belief in God and a God-given belief in myself. There is no doubt in my mind that my faith in Him emboldened me.

I think back on that little girl living in poverty--moved every three months, sexually abused, uneducated parents, crazy (and married over a dozen times) mother, and raised on welfare in a dysfunctional family--who taught herself to sew.

I've examined her thinking and her willingness to try. A ten year old with a hopeful attitude, regardless of the difficulty she lived in.

Here's what I've decided being positive really means: it means finding a way to think and live and feel that is life enhancing rather than life depleting. It is open and life expanding, rather than closed off or in the act of withdrawing.

Rooted with the seeds of hope, being positive is being open to better things happening and thinking along those lines.

It doesn't mean life doesn't have difficulty or challenge. It simply means there is a course of thought, a consciously chosen neurological pathway that is believing and hopeful. There is a presence of gratitude and personal faith that whispers whatever we hope for is possible. And there is a mental choice that says, try. No fear. Then try again, if need be.

Taking life as it comes, gracefully, grows out of a patient, grateful heart. Finding the positive in life comes from a hopeful mind and learning to look forward. It comes from establishing patterns of belief with our thinking.

And finding the opportunity that lies in the middle of difficulty happens when a positive mind and grateful heart is open to the illumination and courage that inevitably follows hope.

So Happy #118 is: Find your hopeful, childlike, fearless self.

Because he, or she, is the key to the strength you need to make your life what you want it to be.

No fear. Or feel the fear and do it anyway.

Either way, love and wishes for fearlessness to you,

Kathleen