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Quote of the Day: Choosing
“When you wake up each morning, you can choose to be happy or choose to be sad. Unless some terrible catastrophe has occurred the night before, it is pretty much up to you. Tomorrow morning, when the sun shines through your window, choose to make it a happy day.” – Lynda Resnick
For me, the best thing about 2018 is that it is almost over. If I have had a worse year, I cannot recall it. My wife died, my father died, and my father-in-law (a man I have respected for nearly 50 years) will likely die before the year is out. I had to go to the emergency room in the middle of the night because of difficulties breathing. I have had money and job challenges.
Despite all that, when I wake up each morning I choose to have a happy day. More often than not, I succeed.
In spite of setbacks, my life is still more good than bad. My first grandchild arrived this year. I learned that I have at least one friend I can call after midnight to take me to the emergency room; a friend who not only will take me, but stay with me until I can go home, and whose wife calls later that day to see if I am okay. Despite financial alarums and excursions, all my bills got paid, and there is still money in the bank. I have a roof over my head and food on my table. I have family and friends who care.
We all have troubles. Yet we all have blessings, too. Too few people focus on their blessings instead of their troubles. In the absence of a terrible catastrophe the night before (and I have had several of those days this year) I choose to focus on my blessings.
Published in General
He has my endless admiration for organizing QOTD. I have participated and will again. The trouble is, my so-called memory is highly situational. It is difficult to make good stuff float to the surface of the cesspool of my mind on command; I have to wait for someone to provoke a “that-reminds-me.”
I am planning some peaceful time over the holidays where I can read stuff that will provide inspirational quotes. I just got Volume 4 of Mark Evanier’s collection of daily Pogo strips. That, my annotated Holmes, and a couple of volumes of Mr. Dooley should do the trick.
I was thinking about your hard year and the number of losses you have had to endure. It reminded me of the Pogo Christmas strip that ran the year that Walt Kelly died.
Porkypine: Kind of Christmas that makes you feel more thoughtful rather than jumpin’ and singin.’
Pogo: Yup. We lost so much this year.
Miz Beaver: We didn’t lose so much. We just guv it back after borryin’ it for a while.
Your quote reminds me of the following from Viktor Frankl, as expressed in Man’s Search for Meaning.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl’s memoir was another of my chaplaincy training-manuals, YB-E; a real guiding light.
I think some of these people who make quotes haven’t lived life to the fullest. For instance, being 87 years old, rescued from a fire in nothing but your jammies, and loosing every thing you own, including your pet. My friend has “chosen” to blame G-d, as he must have some special purpose for letting a town burn completely away with all of every ones possessions.
Kay, if memory serves me correctly, Dr. Victor Frankl wrote this book/quote after surviving Auschwitz, losing his entire family in the process. I think that gives him some credibility; although one is free to disagree with his conclusion.
Death has this much to be said for it:
You don’t have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you—free.
—Kingsley Amis
I have never read that book, so can’t comment on it. My only personal reference to unbearable tragedy is my friend Bev recently from Paradise CA. I am not as well read as I would like to be.
Here’s another good book:
Understood, Kay; didn’t want you to think the quote had come from a poseur. Dr. Frankl had some real metaphysical “chops”. :-)