“All in the eye of the beholder – Some of the most destructive forces in the world (Fire & Water), can also have the power of beauty.”~
Martin R. Lemieux
xoxo Kim
Tag Archive | attitude
Disposition
“I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.” ~Martha Washington
❤ 😀
xoxo Kim
Beautiful.
(the sunset today – the moon is out too, a thin sliver, how beautiful!)
“It was early morning. Smoke hung in the air. There was sunlight passing through the smoke. It was beautiful.
‘It is beautiful!’ the Tao said.
And so it was.”
This is out of a Kindle book I have called “Tao Sutra: Opening the Door to the Senses,” a book full of short stories like this laced with wisdom, love, life lessons, and beauty.
It’s written by Amit Basu.
This perfect lil story reminds us to acknowledge the beauty all around us at any given moment and also that attitude is just about everything. If we believe it’s beautiful then it is.
There is always something to see beauty in. ❤
Thank You for the recent comments to me! I always appreciate each & every one of them and all of my readers!
I will respond soon! ❤ 😀
xoxo Kim
Is it worth it?
“Everytime you get upset at something, ask yourself if you were to die tomorrow, was it worth your time being angry?”
This is a great reminder to stop and think about it when we are angry. It’s likely unnecessary and not worth it. It’s so true. When we really contemplate some things we do and say, we may see they aren’t worth the energy & space they take up. How about replacing them with more positive, loving enery, words, thoughts, & actions?
Everything will be so much better!
I hope your day/night is a great one!
❤ 😀
Much love,
xoxo Kim
Attitude of Gratitude
“If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough.” ~ Oprah Winfrey
This is so true! It’s not about what we have but how we perceive this life that contributes mostly to gratitude & happiness. Even with very little, we still have a lot when we have a great attitude.
❤ 😀
I saw this quote today and it's a wonderful reminder!
Much love,
xoxo Kim
Getting older
“I love getting older. My understanding deepens. I can see what connects. I can weave stories of experience and apply them. I can integrate the lessons. Things simply become more & more fascinating. Beauty reveals itself in thousands of forms.” ~ Victoria Erickson
❤ 😀
Getting older is often seen as a negative thing, so many people complain about getting older and turning cetain ages but it’s actually a blessing to live to be as old as possible. Every age and stage of life has its blessings. The older we get, the deeper our wisdom grows. If we were younger we wouldn’t know as much as we do now and if we want to be us now but just a younger age, there would be no difference except for the numerical lable.
In Buddhist class last week, we were reminded of how each situation or stage of life can be seen as good or bad and can be strongly desired then when we finally get there, we see it’s not the perfection we made it out to be. We become disillusioned and see that this thing we desired so much, it too has its unpleasant qualties. For example, many people can’t wait to move out into their own place, leaving the family house they were born into. They think about the independence they’ll have but then when they get out, they see they have so much responsibilty they never had before. Being on our own is great but it’s not “perfect.”
Many single people wish they were married but then many get married and it may be great but there will still be complications and struggles we don’t have to endure while single.
We may wish we had an amazing looking lover then we get him/her and then feel jealous like the person is desired by everyone else and it was easier to not have that ridiculously attractive person. lol This is a funny example our teacher gave. It had everyone laughing.
Many people without kids think their lives will be perfect after having kids but then the kids come along and it’s amazing for people who want them, but there are struggles they never realized.
Lots of kids want to grow up fast but then many adults wish to be younger.
We may want a more impressive job or a promotion but then that comes with struggles and distress we did not have before.
So, see each stage and age of life has beautiful blessings but also struggles. None of them are pure bliss. But we can still make whatever age and stage we are at, blissful, simple, beautiful.
It’s all about how we look at it. Many people would give anything to be where I am right now even though sometimes I wish I were somewhere else in life.
Many people complain about turning 30 or 40 years old but then there are people diagnosed with a terminal illness who want nothing more than to live to see their 30th or 40th or 80’th birthday. If you ever complain about your age because you feel “old,” just imagine if you get diagnosed with a disease and are told by doctors that you will likely be dead within a matter of months. Wouldn’t you give almost anything to go back to that problem of being “old?”
I met people who have breakdowns merely because they just turned a year older.
One day at work a few years ago, I told a girl “happy birthday” and she burst out sobbing and said “no don’t say that! There’s nothing happy about it, I’m old!!!” She was 38 years old.
Poor girl. But to someone else, turning 38 years old is the absolute greatest blessing on Earth. Like maybe someone who almost died once or was told s/he likely wouldn’t live that long. It’s all about our perspective and we CAN change our perspective.
Many years ago when I was young, 20 something years old, I read a true story in a magazine written by a young woman who was recently (back then) diagnosed with terminal cancer. She wrote something like “by the time you read this, I will probably be dead.” Her name was Stephanie. She was happy and engaged to be married to a wonderful man and she said after she received the diagnosis, it was kind of like being in another world. I don’t remember the exact words but her writing, I remember it being so profound and I imagined myself in her place and felt her emotional pain. I really felt it.
I can never know what it’s like to be terminally ill, any aspect of it, unless it happens to me, but her writing portrays so well what it’s like that I was able to deeply imagine and get a fraction of a feel.
Not all writing can do that. She was very skilled.
She said shortly after the diagnosis, she was out walking with her fiance and she was so envious of every single person she laid eyes on that day. All of those people who would likely live to see many more birthdays while she wouldn’t live to see her very next one.
She was disturbed when people would tell her that it’s really no different for a terminally ill person because anyone can die at any second. A healthy person can step off a curb into a street and be struck by a car and killed in an instant. But she said for the terminally ill, it is different because they have a death sentence or something like “chasing” them to kill them. Again, I do not remember the exact words. But this is the sentiment.
She said to be terminally ill is like having a speeding train constantly coming at us and it’s bound to eventually catch up.
Yes, we can all die in an instant, young, old, healthy, sick, innocent, guilty alike….but no it’s not the same for a terminally ill person. They very likely will die soon. Most people won’t be killed although we can be.
After reading her story in that magazine, I looked her up on the internet. I don’t remember much but I do remember her name and face and blonde hair. Unfortunately, like she wrote, by the time I discovered and read her story in the magazine, she was dead. Cancer took her beautiful life.
And I’m still here, alive & well. So it was different for her.
I feel like maybe if I was just diagnosed with an illness and told I probably won’t live to be thirty years old then I heard people complaining about getting older, I would be kind of pissed and a bit resentful. lol
Once we’re diagnosed with a terminal illness, age doesn’t matter all of a sudden. Why should it ever matter?
Once in Buddhist class, our teacher said, imagine if we just were handed the most expensive diamond in the world and are now financially rich beyond our wildest imagination.
How would you feel?
Then a few hours later, you’re diagnosed with a terminal illness and told by a doctor that you will very likely be dead within a few months.
Now is the diamond still worth anything to you personally (it will still be good for your family if you have one)? Are you still thrilled? Does all the junk you can buy still matter?
This is an example to show that things aren’t inherently good or bad but our mind places the value on it. A diamond can be very valuable to us one second then the very next second, it means nothing. Most people would probably love receiving this wealth but then what if we receive it then an hour later our child dies or our close friend or our pet or parent, we probably wouldn’t care so much anymore about the material wealth.
Health is more important (in my opinion), than being financially or materially rich. But in some ways, the most important thing is our attitude. We can’t always help being sick or financially struggling but we can always choose our reactions and as long as we have a positive attitude and inner bliss, our outside environment cannot touch us.
Let’s cherish wherever we are right now and warmly embrace it even if we are working or hoping for something else one day.
And here is a great song that shows how something amazing (having an incredibly beautiful wife/girlfriend) still can have its unpleasantness about it.;-D
“When you’re in love with a beautiful woman
You watch your friends
When you’re in love with a beautiful woman
It never ends
You know that it’s crazy
You want to trust her
Then somebody hangs up when you answer the phone
When you’re in love with a beautiful woman
You go it alone.” ~ Dr. Hook
mobile:
desktop:
“When you’re in love with a beautiful woman
You watch her eyes
When you’re in love with a beautiful woman
You look for lies
Everybody tempts her
Everybody tells her
She’s the most beautiful woman they know”
lol Great song!
❤
😀
Much love,
xoxo Kim
Space
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. “ ~ Viktor E. Frankl
This is a quote I found in a book about addiction & mindfulness. But it’s a great concept that can apply to any situation. We have the power to choose how to respond to whatever provokes us. It may feel like we have no choice and no control over a situation but the reaction is always in our control even if we cannot yet choose our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. In this space, we can refine our ability to proact,. This space is empowering and it’s true our response can either contribute to evolving or to destruction. The more we choose to respond with positivity, love, grace, gratitude, and optimism, the more we evolve.
We are truly liberated when we learn to always or frequently respond in a productive or positive way to people and situations that potentially tempt us to lash out or respond negatively in some way. When we have or cultivate a pro-active attitude and strengthen/maintain it, no matter what happens, no one and nothing gets over on us.
This is me today at work.
I hope your day/night is going beautifully! I was at work all day trying to work on blog posts and things but had no Internet connection. It wasn’t a really busy day but busier than it has been. But when I was not tending to customers and doing work related things and bloggy things, I read books on my Kindle app. It was frustrating at some points because the wifi would come on and I would begin writing things then trying to send them and it would go off before going through and sometimes I would lose what I wrote.
So I decided to see what quotes I have saved in my phone and found this! Great quote for the situation! 😀
Much love, ❤
Xoxo Kim
Beautiful
“I know who I am. I am not perfect. I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world. But I’m one of them.” ~ Mary J. Blige
As I mentioned in my last post, my word for this year’s one word challenge is Beauty.
I believe it’s good to celebrate our own beauty as well as each other’s and the beauty of life in general.
I wrote a long post on the one word challenge and lost much of the post now have to rewrite it! That sucks! oh, well. I hope I remember it all. But like I shared here before, when I lose stuff I write, I try to make it even better. Remember to save your work every couple of seconds. It’s worth it!
This is a picture of me in Summer 2015 at Wildwood, NJ. I chose this to share because I love my geuine smile and did not know my dad was taking the picture. I was so happy about getting into the eight feet water to go swimming! 😀 ❤
I love this quote. It's a great attitude to have. If we believe we are one of the most beautiful then we are! Confidence is sexy.
I love when I see a woman I think is prettier than me. I'm blessed to be able to see and receive her beauty.
Instead of feeling low that someone has something more or better, we can just be happy for those people instead and bask in the beauty of those people. Let’s be inspired by their beauty and accomplishments.
I hope you are having a beautiful day or night! 😀
Much love, ❤
xoxo Kim
The Life Before Her Eyes
“As much as we can be overwhelmed by the world, we can also draw hope from it, from beauty, from promise, from the simple fact that we have the talent to imagine our future selves from all the possible lives that pass before our eyes. We must imagine our lives well. We must engage our conscience.”
Some years ago, I watched a movie called “The Life Before Her Eyes” over & over. I love movies that have to do with friendship. This movie is a very sad movie but very good. It’s about two high school girls who are best friends, one is a “good girl” and the other is a “bad girl” but they are the best of friends. Their friendship is so tender and loving and warm and even after they get into an argument. The girls do a great job playing the part. A true friendship like this one is a great blessing! I think platonic friendship is one of the greatest gifts in life.
A kid comes to school one day with a gun and kills a lot of people, including one of the girls. The other girl develops severe post traumatic stress and struggles with her loss, guilt, and anxiety and caring for her family after she grows up with a family of her own years later. She can’t let go of the past and overcome it and move forward. I wouldn’t expect someone to completely forget that her best friend was murdered and all those other people and wouldn’t expect her grief to go away but it’s possible to heal to a certain point. She has a lot of difficulty. I recently watched the movie again.
This line above is out of one of the scenes. Isn’t it inspiring? So full of hope & beauty.
I love how many scenes in this movie can be analyzed and interpreted, like they have underlying meanings.
It’s a great movie but I would never recommend it to someone who has ever been involved in a school (or any) massacre, especially one involving gun violence. It may be a serious trigger.
I hope you are having a beautiful day/night!
😀
Much love & light, ❤
Xoxo Kim
Currently……<3
One of those fun bloggy surveys!
Currently….
Book: Fatal Decision by John Greenwood- a Kindle book. seriously the most terrifying book I ever read! I’m not through with it yet and it’s very disturbing. I can feel all the terror and emotions along with the characters. It’s not gory or anything (which I prefer – I do not like gory) but the plot is horrifying. A mom and dad of a thirteen year old little boy find that someone went to their son’s school pretending to be his uncle and kidnaps the boy. The father later receives an anonymous phone call by a man telling him not to tell the police he has contact with the kidnappers or they’ll kill his child. Then the man tells the dad he has to kill an innocent person or he’ll not see his son alive again. Either way, the kidnappers will give his boy back but if the dad doesn’t kill the innocent person for them, his son will be brought back dead. If he kills the innocent person, his son will be brought back alive and well. Holy Hell!! And the kidnappers keep killing innocent people to show how serious they are. They have no problem killing. They stalk the boy’s dad and see almost everything he does and know where he is each moment of everyday so they’ll likely know if he tells the police he talks to them. They even see in his house! He doesn’t know how and when he looks around he cannot see them anywhere. The book is very good. It does have quite a few spelling/grammatical errors. Books I read usually do not have this many. I’m no grammar phanatic but it’s surprising that a published book has so many. I can’t (truthfully) say the book is very well written in my opinion, in some way, but in another way it is. The author captures the terrible emotions of the parents extremely well. The characters are very much alive, in my opinion. I can imagine real parents who lose children, reacting the same way, experiencing the same breakdowns and agony. They are very realistic. Some characters in some books are one-dimensional or emotionless seeming. I usually stop reading them when they are. I read part of a fiction book before with a fascinating plot including a little girl going missing and something strange keeps happening but I stopped reading it because the parents have no emotion, not like being shocked and emotionless after a tragedy but they just have no life in them even before the child went missing. It’s like the author wasn’t empathetic enough while writing it to portray real emotions through fiction writing. I don’t recommend books before completing them but I will probably recommend this one to those who don’t mind errors all throughout and less than superb writing. It’s still a great book! It has great reviews too, almost 5 stars out of 5 and 94 people reviewed it. It has 187 pages. I usually prefer them longer but it’s ok! Right now, I still give it 5 stars!
Also a book called “The Philosophy of the Enlightenment” by Ernst Cassirer. Very interesting! 😀
Nail polish: still painted for Christmas! One hand green and the other red! All chipped up now!
Favorite drink: iced tea, coca cola – same as always
Photo: Me on New Year’s Eve!
& me on New Year Day:
Guilty pleasure: fictional horror mystery books! Ahh!! ;-D And Christmas cookies on sale! Lol I got up at 2:00 in the morning one morning recently and ate a whole bag while reading a scary book in the dark with my dogs! Fun!
Thing thankful for: I’m thankful for my attitude or feeling that everything works out so well for me. Since I was very young, I have often felt that things just fall into place easily for me. I’m mostly referring to all the little things. I don’t believe in luck but I have always felt “lucky.”
I got to go to the University I always wanted to go to. It’s the only one I applied to. When things of mine break, they usually start working again right when I need them. I usually don’t have to wait too long for a bus I’m waiting for even if I wasn’t looking at the schedule. Whenever I want something at a store, they usually have it….stuff like this. It’s not always that things work out perfectly for me. Sometimes I’m waiting for a bus in zero degree weather for over an hour. Sometimes a store is out of stuff I really, really need/want. But I remember even being in Kindergarten when I was five years old and feeling as if I’m so “lucky” and everything works out in my favor. I can even remember a couple of things I thought of as examples back then! I still feel this way, even right now. I think it’s not just external things working out well but my attitude. I have a strong attitude of gratitude. Even with depression when it would flare up. I can’t feel it to the fullest usually like I do when I’m not depressed but still I feel it often even when I’m severely depressed. The thing is, with depression it’s often hard to focus on that gratitude but it’s possible. Gratitude is so healing. When I truly focus on not only the things to be thankful for but my thankfulness for them, even when I can’t feel it as strongly, it really touches my depression and sometimes lifts it a little bit or even a lot. I never have bad days because even on the rare days where it seems one thing after another goes wrong, I am soon reminded of all the things that go right.
Even on those days where one thing after another goes wrong, one thing after another also goes right. And I usually automatically see that but when I don’t, I try to intentionally focus on it.
When I’m not suicidal, I think any day I’m alive is a good day and when I am suicidal, I can still think of the things going right. I couldn’t always do this when I would be suicidal. I used to know of all my good things but just ignore them for the bad, often. Sometimes good things would keep popping out at me over n over and I would deny them because I was so depressed. But through the years I learned more and more to focus on the good. Even when I want to die, I can still see good. It just doesn’t take away my despair or sense of worthlessness and purposelessness always but does me good still. Gratitude is the best attitude for depression! It’s stronger than depression if we allow it to be. It’s a great attitude for anyone with or without depression. If you don’t have it naturally like I do, you can develop it and if you already have an attitude of gratitude, you can strengthen it or make it more frequent. And if you already live in complete, boundless gratitude every second of every day, that’s amazing! (but probably very rare) 😀 ❤
Richard Branson once said “I was born under a lucky star…” He is a very rich man financially but also in his attitude about life. And I don’t think his money has to do with it. I think he is just a happy man with a great attitude, money or not. We can all have that attitude. His statement “I was born under a lucky star” inspires me. I feel the same way and when I forget, I just remind myself that. And I’m what some people can call “dirt poor” financially(I don’t even have phone service! But I don’t mind!). Lol! So it’s not the money! This goes to show even more that depression isn’t just about being spoiled & ungrateful. An attitude adjustment can do us good but depression is more than just that.
Drink – a “no name” brand of root beer. Isn’t that so weird?! I never liked root beer for as long as I can remember but when I’m sick, I crave it. It’s so weird. It’s actually called Tubz and reminds me of my dog, Isis Summerjo, my fuzzy sausage girl! Little kids often call her piggy or the piggy dog! lol
Fashion: hmmm…I know nothing about fashion! lol
Laughing at: the Buddhist class I attended for New Year’s Eve was funny! Our teacher is really funny; I laughed a lot! Lol ;-D
Also this,
(cute picture but it’s not mine!)
Fear: I’m not afraid of anything at the moment!
Weather: a bit cold. Just the way I like it! 😀
Grateful for: my good physical health – I have a sinus thing going for the last few days but generally my physical health is great. And for the good physical health of everyone else who isn’t sick. ❤
Feeling: more uplifted than I have been. Writing here is inspiring! I mostly like to write for others who will potentially come across it but it’s also good for me! ❤
Looking forward to: a new Kindle book released next month! A fiction suspense thriller! I been waiting seven months! Ahhh!! ;-D Book 3 in a series by Dr.Carey Baldwin. Totally can’t wait!! I have a big, bright smile just thinking about it! 😀
Thank You everyone for the comments, likes, shares….I always appreciate it! ❤
Much love,
xoxo Kim
