Daily Gratitude: How often do we get a “crick” in the neck when we’re looking back? When that happens, we remain stuck with our head in the rear position. What happens then is that we are unable to move our head and eyes back to the front. It’s so important for us to always be able to have “eyes forward” all the time. If we’ve looked back it should only be to see what lessons the universe has given us to help us with our next steps. Then it’s time to apply those lessons to our current situation and make our next actions based on the lessons.

Daily Gratitude: I found this recently and think it’s excellent and I’ve added it to my list of important mantras. It goes quite well with “this, too, shall pass”. Some days are terrific and you never want them to end. It pays to not go overboard in excitement on these days because the pendulum will eventually swing the other way. This is not negative thinking. It’s just the cyclical nature of the universe. Don’t spend a lot of time worrying about when things will change. Just don’t be surprised when it does. Along those same lines just know that when things aren’t that great, this will change to a diamond day! You can look forward to that. Life is full of ups and downs and things continually change. Learn to roll with the flow.

Daily Gratitude: This is an interesting definition of courage. I think it helps more than some of the others for me at least. Essentially, if you’re afraid of something, you need to find something that is related to that fear but to you that thing is much more important than the fear. I look back on my life and I see how that has been true. I rarely have gotten rid of the fear but have often been able to act past it when something was really important to me. I have always had a tremendous fear of dentists. But in late 2018 I forced myself to have extensive dental surgery. Why? Because i wanted to do my attempt to cross the USA on foot and needed to have it done to hopefully prevent being sidelined because of anything dental related. That took great courage- which i was able to muster only because I had wanted to do this crossing for 30 years. I didn’t want anything to interfere. I was also extremely afraid of airplanes when I was young. I was in Vermont when my grandfather died in Florida. It was very important for me to go to the funeral for my grandmother so i had to push past the fear to get on two airplanes. Had my grandmother been the one who passed away i would have never gone because my grandfather was not very cognitively aware and he wouldn’t have known. Think back over your life and see if you can find any times that you overcame your fear!