Here's somethiing which none of us....

....can deny - We all begin life as babies. But we do not all end it as elderly people! (Well, I'm guessing that nobody's denying it.)  Even if we live to a ripe age, we can stay young at heart. By kicking complaint and criticism into the long grass in favour of tolerance and appreciation, we can avoid growing sour, stroppy and set in our ways. This in turn will keep us looking and feeling fresh and attractive.

Foster your most childlike qualities and you'll easily cope with any potentially draining difficulty. Resentment will make matters worse. Innocent trust will make them better.

The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway.       (Henry Boye)

A difficult starting point....

.....but maybe the best one - 

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, 

and do it with no thought of any reward. 

Your life will never be the same again. 

(Og Mandino)

I would not be able...

....to sleep tonight if I leave you feeling deprived, so let's have a 'they say....' moment.

Don't push your luck. That's what they say. But are they are right? (Well, if 'they' are, I wish they'd told me 30 or so years ago.)   A gentle push can create momentum where none might otherwise have developed. It is possible to push your luck too far, but there is a greater risk in not pushing it far enough.

Ideally, though, you don't want to push your luck, you want to put yourself into a position in which your luck can push you. You want to be open, flexible and ready to roll with an opportunity if or when it arises.

If a window of opportunity appears, don't pull down the shade.

If we're truly honest....

.....we wouldn't want to publicly go into depth about the mistakes we've made in the past and/or any embarrassing situations we got into. We would most likely want to see and feel discretion and sympathy. 

So let's push to one side all the aspects of the past that it might be more comfortable to forget and greet this new era with enthusiasm. The future is an open book.  Who's to say it won't make for a good read.  After all, it is something we create, it's not something we inherit.

The only thing any of us can be really sure of is that if we do what we've always done, 

we'll get what we've always got.

We're often told....

....that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again whilst expecting a different result. But how can we trust people who say this? We don't know how sane, or otherwise, they are.

 

Sometimes, when we persistently repeat an exercise, we improve our ability to perform it - and then we get a very different result indeed.

He who sows courtesy reaps friendship.     (Saint Basil)

We always want things....

 ....the way we think they should be. When our plans go awry, we feel let down. We have ideas about what's appropriate, beliefs about what's desirable, expectations about what's feasible. We can't help this. It's the way we are made. We are, though, also made with a little 'switch' in the back of our minds. We can train ourselves to turn off, or at least tone down, certain thought processes. 

Like a valve grown stiff from years of sitting behind a cupboard, never being used, this inner facility is not always easy to access. But if you now want to change the way you look at life, you can. And then it will prove easy to alter life itself!

Hope is like the sun which, as we journey towards it, casts the shadow
of our burden behind us.  (Samuel Smiles)

I think it's fair....

....to say that everyone has a cynical part within them.  Even the most optimistic and open-minded amongst us find that there is a subject, somewhere in our lives, about which we take a cold, doubtful view. That's healthy and appropriate, up to a point. We don't want to become prejudiced and gullible.

But, whenever we close our mind to an idea that a part of us would like to believe in, we risk shutting ourselves off from our own softness and sensitivity.

Improve your spare moments and they will become the brightest gems in your life. 

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)