Focus on the Positive

There’s a pinhead size blindspot in the middle of my right eye. It’s still the first thing I notice every morning when I wake up. You’d think that having lived with it for more than two years now, I’d be pretty much over it, but each morning when I wake up, there it is. It’s like I forget it’s there over the course of each day, and so when I see (or rather, don’t see it) each morning, it’s new all over again.

It doesn’t upset me as much now as it did then. While I see it new each time, it’s something that has become routine. Why do I bring it up today? Because today when I noticed it, it made me think about how in a way, that experience can represent a lot of the difficulties we encounter in life.

This blindspot isn’t big, but it’s central to my vision. It would be easy to focus on that. To really get bugged by that small piece of my eye that’s stopped working instead of appreciating all the vision that is still open to me.

It doesn’t usually take much for a day to go from normal to bad or normal to great. A few experiences one way or the other, and we’re left with an overall feeling of elation or disappointment. DC is always describing days as “The best day ever!”, and it’s easy to see why. She’s great at focusing on the positive things that happen and forgetting the negative. It’s something I need to work on, some days more than others. I can have something go wrong with my day, and it makes the entire rest of the day droop because of it.

I’m convinced that it doesn’t need to be this way. That if I practice more on seeing the good, the negative will get left behind. The trick is in actually doing it.

Any of you out there have any tips or tricks?

And for those of you wondering about the connection of this post and the picture at the top: