You are the most important person in your life journey because you cannot proceed any further without you. This journey’s goal, beauty, and happiness are based on your perspectives, attitudes, and priorities. Your attitudes and perspectives are the eyeglasses you wear, and you will see how you have colored them with your expectations and experiences in your life. If you wear yellow glasses, you will always see everything yellow, including yourself. Therefore, your perspectives are essential to make meaning out of our real lives, especially during hard times.
“if we have the A correct destination and the right road map in life, it will always be a pleasant and remarkable ride to be cherished….”
These days, we witness many activities and read information that is not uplifting our lives and souls. We now listen more than ever to the news about illness, death, division, discord, hatred, vengeance, destruction, etc. We breathe the polluted air of hostility based on color, creed, politics, personal choices, and preferences. We are tired and exhausted, looking for positive changes to bring newness and freshness. We struggle to deal with our daily lives in a broken world without ourselves being broken!
Here we need to take a reality check of our perspective and attitude. Our attitude generates our motivation, leading us to actions that create our natural destiny. Our life destiny is the total of our life’s productivity and creativity. It is all triggered by the attitude of our daily life. Our attitude is like the steering wheel of the vehicle we drive. The vehicle will move in the direction we turn the steering wheel. Undoubtedly, if we have the A correct destination and the right road map in life, it will always be a pleasant and remarkable ride to be cherished.
However, in real life, it is not always the case. There is a gap between the real and the ideal. Most of the time, with some exceptions, we experience this gap more because of the type of eyeglasses that we wear every day. The only way to make the gap narrower is by changing our attitudes. I have heard people say, “I changed my attitude, and that changed my life.” This is very true in real life. If we see the cup as half full rather than half empty, our life will be happy and prosperous. Building that kind of positive attitude amidst hate, chaos, confusion, riots, vengeance, and violence is challenging. These adverse experiences are part of our daily life today and may stay with us for a while. Only positive attitudes can help and deliver us from more significant dangers amid chaotic situations. We know that every situation will pass one day, and this will too! But we are not sure when that will be. It may be helpful to have some level of uncertainty for our own sanity. We have all seen “bees.” They are tiny creatures of God that fly around, making honey for us to make our life sweet. They have the instinct and discernment not to take honey from harmful and poisonous flowers, though honey is available in good and bad flowers. Although small, they are wise enough to differentiate the bad from the good. Are we not higher than them? We are the best of God’s handiwork and the Crown of His Creation.
Have you ever seen a bee sitting on a bag of trash? They always look for sweet flowers, not harmful flowers. It is the flies who sit on trash bags, not the bees! We always have daily opportunities to make choices and qualify ourselves as bees or flies. The fundamental option you and I have to make is whether we want to be a bee or a fly in real life! Both can fly around, but what makes them different is what they seek in their lives. What matters most is not where we come from but where we are going and what we are looking for in this lifetime! I made my choice. How about you?
May God bless us all!
Fr. Tomy J. Puliyan, MSFS
“ Holiness and Happiness through Wellness and Wholeness!”