Does Attitude Affect Life?

It's funny, I wrote this in 2008 when I still had a job and health. I had totally forgotten about this article and unearthed it in my "delete" file.

What is attitude? Some of the definitions the thesaurus gives us are: way of thinking, mind-set, and a point of view.

Can those terms be applied to life? Of course they can, just by analyzing those definitions. A way of thinking gives us many choices. A mind-set can be open or closed. A point of view can come from above, below or even sideways. It can also be humorous, sarcastic, cynical, or loving.

Which of these concepts we choose to apply is up to us. The mistakes many of us make are in the comparisons we draw. When a lot of us are evaluating our lives, we tend to choose unreal targets. Some of us look at the family down the street that has the bigger house and the newer car. Some only see the co-worker who has the higher salary. On TV a lot of us tend to obsess with commercials of spotless houses with germ-free floors and toilets. We watch movies and sitcoms that take place in houses that are never cluttered, messy or dirty.

What many of us fail to see is the homeless person sitting on the corner as we drive home from work. Do many acknowledge the cleaning lady that tends to our office bathrooms on nights and weekends? A lot don't stop do think that commercials and movies take place on sets that are custom built to feed a certain need.

However, not only does the media feed on the greed, there is also another way of creating a mass attitude about life. What if we have chronic disorders like migraines, depression, anxiety etc? Those get labeled as incurable, while marketing a plethora of chemical drugs that have all kinds of side effects. Why throw drugs at us if those disorders are incurable? To help us cope of course while we struggle to obtain all of those things they want us to have.

There is always someone off worse in the world then we are. This isn't meant to downplay the effect an illness like cancer can have. But at least we were blessed with minds, nature, and technology to come up with solutions for ourselves. There are still plenty of people in this world who do not have access to information like we do. All we need to do is use our minds and use the tools we were given to find our own positive answers. Never let anyone convince you that there is no hope. There are many inspiring survivor stories out there, let them be your motivators.