How’s your day been? Have you had “one of those days”? If you haven’t today you will have done so at some point.

You know the sort of days I mean. Nothing seems to go right, the universe keeps throwing problems at you and you end the day with more worries than you started with. We all have days like that from time to time.

It’s so frustrating. You crawl into bed feeling tired and annoyed at having achieved nothing – and wake the next day demotivated before you even begin. So you have another bad day.

It’s a downward spiral that we can easily get into. So try to stop it before it starts. You can’t always stop the bad days happening – the universe is like that – but you can contol the way you respond to them.
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Henrik Edberg has a great post over at The Positivity Blog. It’s called 11 Questions That Could Help You to Vastly Improve the Quality of Your Life in 2009 and is well worth a read.

One of the questions that made me stop and think more than the others was number ten: “Am I detached from the results? “. Now one of the things I’m constantly talking about is the importance of remembering why you’re doing things, using the reasons to provide guidance and motivation. At first sight this would seem to be at odds with staying detached from results.

Yet I completely agree with Henrik when he says:

But when you play/blog/work etc. stay unattached to the outcome. Just focus on what’s in front of you. Things will become easier. You’ll create less inner anxiety and pressure for yourself. And you will perform better because you are focusing on what’s right in front of you and not weighing yourself down with a lot of imagined or real expectations from other people and self-created negativity.

How to reconcile the two approaches?
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I’m a great fan of pinball and spent much of my life as a student happily flipping the silver ball.

When you’re playing pinball you don’t just bash the flippers and hope for the best. There are certain shots to aim for and certain goals to achieve. Ideally you bring the ball to rest on a flipper then take your time and make a carefully aimed shot.

Unfortunately a pinball table rarely lets you have an ideal shot. Instead there are times when you’re main concern is saving the ball. There’s no time to plan carefully and make sure your shot’s perfectly on target. That’s especially true in multi-ball mode where the table throws everything at you.

Life’s like that too.
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It’s been a while since I posted here, almost six months. That’s been due to a series of health problems and scares with myself and my family. Fortunately the major scares resolved ok and all are well. Hopefully things will remain that way.

One effect of this sort of thing is to act as a Memento Mori – a reminder that life is short and precious. We can’t afford to waste it, can’t afford to bumble along expecting something good to happen just around the next bend. We need to make good things happen here and now.

As it says in the tagline of this blog: Life – Put more in, get more out. I believe that now more than ever.

So expect a positive flurry posts from now on as I do my best to live up to this philosophy and seize the day. I hope you’ll think about joining in with comments.

Photo Credit: Randy OHC (Creative Commons)

There’s an excellent sketch show on CBBC called Stupid. One of the recurring characters is the “Want it? Can’t have it!” girl. Her gimmick is offering something that someone really wants then, at the last moment, pulling it back.

I don’t know about you but sometimes I feel the universe is like that: it holds out the promise of something you really want, let’s you get so close and then, at the last moment, snatches it away.

Obviously that’s an unhelpfully negative viewpoint. How can we reframe it into a positive?
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