Today is Monday Tuesday. The first Monday Tuesday. It’s cold. There are flakes of snow flying upward as I look out my window. Gone is Christmas and our Warm December. We are in it now, particularly in upstate New York. For the vast majority of us the next 3 months will last longer than the following 9.
The new year, particularly one celebrated on a Friday where the world is off from work, offers so much hope for a bright future. Optimism is truly engaging, addicting, and life changing. For too many people, the piece of optimism that has yet to evolve is our inability to bottle it. Optimism in the form of renewed hope is an emotion more than a thought. Those who are able to bottle it are the luckiest and most blessed among us.
So what do you do? How do you roll out of bed and keep that same feeling you had 4 days ago? How do you do it 4 weeks from now? 4 months from now? Optimism, like so much else in our world, is a business.
A couple of helpful suggestions I’m working out in my own head as we work our way through a familiar terrain that never fails to feel foreign.
1) Be you, the real you. I think we’ve passed the point in society where advice to conform to others ideals is dead. As least I hope we have. I’ve done a lot of thinking on this recently, and I wonder how many of us stop on a daily basis and give thought to what it is we want out of life, and how we do that? It’s a small number. The rest of us are running a rat race (me included), searching for goals set by others (me included)- be they family, friends, bosses or competitors. How many reading this have truly stopped and said, “What do I want?”
2) Do what you love. Simple, right? Everyone has something they truly love to do. For me, it’s writing. And I’m ready to admit, I actually enjoy when other people read what I’ve written. I enjoy the feedback, good and bad. I was told this weekend by someone I truly respect and admire that the key to writing these days is to keep it short. The one thing I can’t do. And so I wrestle with keeping it short so more people will read it, or being true to me (as number one says), and just going with the audience intended to read. Those not afraid of words. I struggle with letting Twitter allow the trolls to rule the world. Stay tuned.
3) Change the World. Changing the world is easy, despite what the masses will have you believe. The world is full of wonder and hope. And as a society, in the early days of 2016, the majority of mindless drones that live on it, are doing their best to kill it. It won’t be a fossil fuel induced global warming epidemic that ends life here. Nor will it be a World War caused by a nuclear weapon. Or famine. Or blight. It will be a lack of love that leads to a lack of thought that leads to a lack of innovation.
The greatest inventions in the history of mankind, the ones that truly changed the world, were pursued with the idea of improving the life of mankind on earth. Many of them had financial rewards for their founders, many did not. What they had in common was each person set out to make something better.
What if today, we all went out with the goal in mind to make the world a better place. And then we talked about it. What if 30 people did something this week to improve the world for the people in it? And then bragged about it! What if we took the most important invention of the 21st century- Facebook- and we turned it into an actual benefit for humankind.
What if… Instead of talking about the Kardashians, mocking people trying to change, and the 3,000 other things that fill our scrolling with mind numbing intensity… We instead talked about how to make things better.
I get it. It’s a great place to see people’s kids. Yes they’re cute. And people’s meals. Yes, you did a good job. And people’s… whatever.
Yes, it’s a great spot to forget about the worries of the world. And that’s the problem. Too many of us have stopped worrying about the world, and passed if off to others.
What if today you set out to change the world? What if you told people about it. What if we flipped the script?
We are surrounded by things that do not want this to happen. We are surrounded by people that make money off of people ignoring what I just said and blindly buying a gadget that stops them from talking to their wife at dinner, which leads to resentment, which leads to lawyers, which leads to mid-life crisis, which leads to another marriage, which leads to buying more stuff, which leads to…….. Stop.
What if we flipped the script? What if 2016 was the year we took our lives back? I know this will sound crazy to so many people. That’s okay. I also know a few people that will dig it, see it, and do it, because it’s who they are.
I will #writeon this year. That will be my contribution. I’ll make it public, proudly, in the hopes that one or two people, every now and then, see it, agree with it, and flip the script. Our lives are our lives. It’s time to start acting like it.
loveistheremedy 