Alexandersmap

    Category: Optimism

    • To Build Better Days

      Winter days are growing longer. Have you seen the lingering light? Sure, there will be many more cold days ahead, and many more frigid nights. But the earth is tilting back towards the north, offering a gift of brighter each day.

      Nature offers lessons, should we see them. Our hardest days will pass, should we be resilient. Our darkest days will turn brighter when we become aware of the light. And we ourselves—unkempt, distracted and full of accumulated empty calories, may reset and focus on steady improvement in the key areas of our life. Our path isn’t always ours to determine, but how we react to it is uniquely ours.

      Today is ripe with opportunity or it will surely dash our dreams, ’tis largely up to us to decide. When we feel the world is in a rut, when everything has brought us down into despair or depression, why linger there? The only viable choice is to begin climbing. Now is as good a time as any to reset and begin again. To build better days one choice at a time.

    • A Sense of Progress

      “One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress.” — Daniel Kahneman

      “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there” — Charles Kettering

      This writer’s near-constant focus on improvement is simply a reminder to keep going towards the things that we can control. Sure; momento mori, but before that, we ought to have something to look forward to. A sense of progress is essential to our well-being. We’re all heading towards something, and we’d like to think it’s something better than everything that surrounds us now. Better health. Better relationships with others. Better options for how we spend a random Friday night. Focusing on one thing we may improve upon leads us to better in that thing. Expand that improvement to a few things, and maybe we can feel some positive momentum developing.

      The world may feel like a hot mess right now, and really, there are compelling reasons to feel that way. We cannot control most of what is happening, but we should raise our voice when we can influence the trajectory. How we treat others, and how we treat ourselves, matters more than we realize in any given moment. Ripples project from the center, but they also interact with other ripples. So we must always strive for that evasive personal excellence (arete), knowing that it’s not something that stays bottled up in our core, but is something that projects outward towards others, raising the standard for each of us.

      The thing is, we tend to become what we focus on. When we focus on the steady decline of society, we become fearful and mistrustful, which perpetuates, well, the decline of society. When we focus on developing new skills and our overall fitness, we realize incremental improvements that lead us to a higher level of performance. This in turn may transform our belief in the state of things from pessimistic to optimistic. Applying that positive force on building bridges and lighting beacons of hope may just transform others along the way.

      One twist in our belief for the future may just spritz a little joy into an otherwise methodically-dismal life designed by the doom cycle trolls. Indeed, we’re collectively heading towards the very thing we focus on the most. We ought to set the compass accordingly. Make some progress today—towards something better. It makes a world of difference.

    • Optimistic Tendencies

      “Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders – not average people.” — Daniel Kahneman

      I’m generally optimistic by nature, so reading Kahneman’s observations on optimism was a brief boost to the ego. It’s nice to think that we’re not average people, but really, most of us are pretty average when measured against the billions of souls who are navigating the world at the same time as us. Yet each of us may be extraordinary to somebody.

      The world may be uglier and meaner now than it’s ever been in my living memory, but the pendulum will swing back one day. How far it swings back, who knows? But we may have a garden, we may write blog posts that focus on the climb to a better place, we may read poetry and support local artists. In short, we may engage in a campaign of civility and empathy all our own.

      Leadership is all of these things. We lead by example by working on ourselves first—building a foundation of emotional intelligence, awareness and self-actualization propelled forward by a keen sense of direction. Leaders show the way by consistently doing the things that need to be done. We don’t have to have a title to be a leader, just do what must be done and others will see.

      What will we take from this day? Perhaps the better question is, what will we give to this day? Begin within, and see what we may realize in our contribution to a path forward. Progress is made by those who focus on a better future with every action taken.