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Thursday, August 16, 2012

Loving More

This week, I've been doing a little personal experiment.

On the twelve hour car ride to Utah, I had a bit of an epiphany. There's something about the open road that inspires me. I know I'm not the only one. Just those long, straight stretches. It really feels like the road of life. Life is a Highway, eh?

Anyways.

I was thinking about things I don't like. Pet peeves. Personality traits. Physical traits. Situations, feelings. The list, though relatively short, goes on. There are certain things that illicit a very visceral reaction from me.

So I saw something, on the drive, that I had historically disliked. But that feeling, that negative feeling... it doesn't make me feel good. And so I thought:

why not love that?

Why not replace the "I hate that" with "I love that," even if it might not be true?
People say it's all about the mindset, and I like to think I live my life that way most of the time. If you think it, it will be. The Secret, the Law of Attraction, the Universe, call it what you will. If I just make the conscious decision to bring a positive thought into my brain, what are the possibilities?

I felt my mood instantly lift. And so I've been practicing. Every time I see something and go to think "Ugh, I don't like that," I instead think "just love that. embrace it."

Sometimes it makes no sense, because sometimes things just aren't good and deserve to be disliked. But. Some things are just a matter of my personal taste, and I am not everyone else. Everyone else is not me. And so I put myself in the shoes of another for just a millisecond and I love that. People deserve to make their own choices and it doesn't serve me to think negatively about things I can't change.

It's not even just about me. It's about opening my mind, thinking about others. Learning about humans. Understanding them and ACCEPTING them, above all. Because that's all I want out of anyone: to be accepted and respected.

So I'm doing this little experiment.
And I'm a lot happier for it so far.

**perhaps an adendum post on what the word love means to me. it has been evolving**

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