simplerich

Today while I was mowing my lawn, and that’s a three and a half hour job on a good day, I was listening to my ipod and getting surly. The grass was wet with dew, the ditch along the road is steep and wet grass is slippery so I kept sliding down the hill. I’m not a huge fan of lawn-mowing in the first place. I do it because I like how it looks when I can see the house over the top of the grass. If I can’t… it’s time to mow.

As I was mowing and getting more and more grumpy and irritated, stewing in my own juices as it were, up popped an ipopin from my playlist "I choose to create a great day." It played and I realized I was choosing to create a crappy day for no reason at all. I am in good health.  It was spring, the weather was borderline great, it was warm enough to need to mow and there was no snow on the ground or in the forecast and I was going to go out to eat, movie, and an ice cream with my best friend of 20 years… and here I sat stewing, brooding, and choosing to be miserable.

Now, I’m not sure where you fall on the affirmation spectrum, but I love them and am a believer. I’ve got a notebook with pages in it of things I’ve written down ten times each morning before I get out of bed. (An idea I got from Dilbert author Scott Adams.) It can’t all be voodoo because some pretty cool stuff has happened that I have pages of proof that I was aiming for. Coincidence? Sure if you want to call it that. Magick? I’m OK with that too. Luck? Fine, whatever you want to call it go for it. I just believe that we can focus our attention on things and have them happen far more often than we give ourselves credit for. This morning I was focusing on being grouchy and the "I choose to create a great day" affirmation from ipopin snapped me out of it.

What has this got to do with a special lady? Ipopin is a company created by Kirsten Harrell and her sister Traci. Kirsten has, I believe, Fibromyalgia. Short description: Chronic pain. Yeah. Two word descriptions are the best aren’t they? They say it enough so you have an idea, but just an idea. Chronic, all the time, you know that three day headache/crick in your neck from sleeping wrong? Yeah, that’s not chronic enough. Chronic is like a full time job, but longer. Pain. Not hurt. A hurt can be a low level throbbing in time with your heartbeat in the pit of your stomach. Think pain… think white-hot coat hanger laying along the inside of your thigh and the thing won’t cool off. Wait! You can’t rub it to make it stop burning because guess what? Touching it makes it worse! WOO HOO! That’s pain. Yeah… now add some of that chronic back in there and what’ve we got?

We’ve got a lady who has that(1)… and as ONE of her businesses, she creates a positive affirmations website where she sells positive affirmations. In her About page she makes passing mention of the pain, but does it in the past tense. She makes no mention of it being here now. She has mentioned it briefly on her blog, but never as something that defines her. She is an example to me of someone who lives with something but doesn’t become it. There are people who endure great pain and suffering and you know about it because it defines them. There are people who have something happen to them in the past and it defines who they are for the rest of their lives. There are people who are defined by what has happened to them. Then there are people who live their lives and while things happen to them and around them they don’t define them.

I have no doubt that there are days that Kirsten lays in bed pulls the covers up over her head and cries into her pillow. I hope those days are also filled with chocolate pudding, soft music, and the love of her friends until it passes. We’re all allowed that sort of day. Oh! Germane to nothing, she loves Princess Bride. Anybody who loves Princess Bride automatically scores an extra plus ten in my book by the way.

So, today, while I was in good health, mowing my lawn in beautiful weather before a day spent with people I love, I was managing to work myself into being miserable for no good reason. Kirsten reached out from Ohio, through my headphones and slapped me up-side {sic} my head and snapped me out of it. If you’ve never considered positive affirmations before you should go grab some. There’s no chance they can hurt. There’s a greater than zero chance that they will help. It also will help a great lady that I respect a great deal.

If you’ve got a blog reader like Google Reader you should subscribe to her blog as well. If you don’t know what a blog reader is stand by for an introduction in a future post. I realize I have some readers who still bookmark my site and come her that way. While I appreciate it that’s very 1990s of you. It’s 2000+ let the Internet come to you!

To tie this post up I’d like to finish the way I started, with a "thank you" for Kirsten Harrell for getting my head out of the gutter and reminding me that "I choose to create a great day!"

(1) I may have taken some artistic license with my descriptions of the pain involved. As far as I know she’s never described it to me so I’m going on what I’ve read about it online. It can vary in intensity, duration, and well, just about every thing.

The Thank you to a special lady… by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.