26 Nov 2025 Life’s not a problem to be solved

Daily Gratitude: When things go in a different direction than you would like or you think they should (I avoided saying “wrong” because that’s an interpretation you put on something. You just may not understand it yet), instead of saying “why” start asking “what”

It shouldn’t be “why me?” or “why did this happen?”. Instead it should be “what am I supposed to learn from this?” And it also helps to ask “what gift is hidden within this?”

If you can start altering how you look at things, they will magically shift in your eyes. It’s not really magic, though. What you see outside of yourself is just a reflection of what’s inside of you and what you are thinking. And you know what? You are in control of what you think and you can change what you think. As you begin to do that changing, you will be surprised that you’re looking at things around you differently.

You can look at things as if they are all bad or mostly bad or maybe just somewhat bad. But what if you decided to try to see everything as good – or to find something good, no matter how tiny in what you’re seeing. Then focus on that tiny thing.

Let’s take a maybe gruesome example. You see a bad car accident. You could focus on the carnage; you could concentrate on the traffic back up; you could think about how lousy a safety rating that car has; you could be sad for the injured people. And so on.

How could you possibly find something good to focus on given that scenario. What if you concentrated on giving thanks for an exceptional first responder system – for the police, the fire rescue folks. The EMTs and paramedics, the people in the hospitals nearby, the modern day communications systems that have enabled quick response and cleanup. Why not concentrate and be grateful that it wasn’t you more or your family members.

Then ask yourself what lesson(s) am i being given? Maybe it’s a driving lesson, maybe it’s something you want to share with your children, maybe it’s that you should pay more attention to gratitude. Who knows. But I guarantee there’s a lesson.

“What is this experience trying to teach me?”

Daily Gratitude: We hear this concept stated in so many different ways that you’d think it would sink in but most of the time it doesn’t.

How many times have you written out lists and ideas of things you want to do and “plan” to do? I bet your answer is at least once or twice; maybe even more.

How many times have you taken action on those things? Maybe you started planning. Maybe you even set down a great list of how you’re going to accomplish something.

Did you follow through on that list and the planning? How many times did you take NO action at all, just leaving the list to eventually be discovered by people who come after you? I should clarify what I mean by “come after you”. I mean your successors not the cops or the bill collectors type people coming for you.

That’s one great thing about this Novel November (formerly existent as National Novel Writing Month). If you want to participate, you have to write 1666 or 1667 words every day in order to get to 50.000 words. That’s pretty simple. It’s not easy even for someone like me who’s pretty wordy. Life gets in the way. But this is relatively short term – 30 days, 50,000 words. No one judges you. It’s an honor system but you know yourself what you have to do. The words may end up being deleted or expounded upon but you’ve written them.

Lots of things happen during this month but I won’t go into them in this post but people take these smell steps. They don’t just plan. And amazingly several hit books have come from this world wide tiny action steps.

What actions or deeds (small steps or deeds) can you do on one of those old lists? Can you start today?