Wonderful thoughts to sidetrack me from complaints

I have been not so well lately. I have every reason to be in a bad mood: I’m tired, I’m feeling nauseous, my sleep cycle is a wreck, and my seasonal allergies are acting up on top of all that.

But I have cats. I’m not in a bad mood, because every morning I wake up to the two most adorable kittycats ever to roam the earth (okay, so I might be a little biased, but they’re certainly in the running.) I usually have a kitty snuggled up by my head and one on my feet, possibly taking up half the bed, and being so cute at it that I can’t bear to push her aside. And all day long, the cats will follow me around and sit next to me and snuggle with me, and they’ll meow for attention and get underfoot if I’m walking about.

All it takes is my cats. Or– if I’m not at home– a pretty photo from the internet, or an unexpected donut day at work, or seashell windchimes, or a particularly nice shade of green, or anything else that I like. Each of these things is a wonder in itself, a beautiful thing that didn’t have to happen, but because the world is full of beautiful things, it did.

In the past, I would brush these things aside: sure, I got a free donut, but now I have to go do chores, and I’m feeling sick, and these pants are wrinkled so why did I wear them, complain, complain. I would mentally complain to myself about all of the things that weren’t right, thinking that if I focused on the things that were wrong, I could then make them better. And while there was some merit to that thought, focusing so much on all the things that needed to be fixed meant that I never had time to enjoy the things that didn’t need to be fixed.

I would say to myself: well, of course this thing is bothering me; it’s a hindrance, a problem; if it weren’t getting in the way of my enjoying other things, then it wouldn’t be a bother. And then I would feel justified in fretting about the problem until it got fixed, on the theory that anything particularly bad would make me keep on thinking about it. But I forgot to realise the other half: anything particularly good would make me think about it, too. It wouldn’t be an enjoyable thing if it weren’t brightening my day and making me forget about my gripes. It makes every bit as much sense to be distracted by the good things as the bad ones.

So that’s it. Instead of thinking about all the bad things that didn’t have to happen to me, I’m going to think about all the good things that didn’t have to happen– and yet somehow, marvellously, did. I will let those things sidetrack me and take up my attention, because that is what especially good things do. What are the odds that I would have come to exist and be so privileged as to get to see ducks in the pond while I was out today? Yet it happened, and that is nothing short of truly amazing.