Painting the great picture every day
I stumbled upon the following quote, written by an anonymous author, on the Internet last week and have been meditating upon it each morning:
Each day is a new canvas to paint upon. Make sure your picture is full of life and happiness, and at the end of the day, you don’t look at it and wish you had painted something different.
What this basically tells me, is that as human beings, from the minute we wake up in the morning, stretch out, roll off the bed and marvel at the beauty outside our windows, we are equipped with the power to make choices on where our lives will be by nightfall.
We choose to wake up without hitting the snooze button and give ourselves adequate time to prepare for the day or lie in bed later than we should then rush through our preparations.
We choose to look out the window and take in the beauty of the clear blue sky or focus on the dirt and frown at how dirty it will make our newly polished shoes.
We choose to share a joke, offer a kind word to our loved ones at the breakfast table or complain about everything that everyone is doing wrong around the house, leaving both our families and the domestic help on edge until we leave for the office.
We choose to look at the infinite possibilities presented with each new day or focus on the infinite stresses plus the overflowing ‘to do list’ in our lives.
We choose to tackle our workload zealously, starting with the most cumbersome task with the full knowledge that getting it out of the way will clear our in-tray and earn us brownie points or keep putting off important tasks until they overwhelm us and we look incompetent.
We choose to love the people in our lives despite their imperfections, notwithstanding how much they have wronged us or focus on their shortcomings and let them irritate us then constantly remind ourselves of how much they ticked us off ‘last time’, thus making none but ourselves very miserable.
We choose to be inspired by the achievements of others and try to learn from them so that we too can achieve or be filled with envy and paint their faults to the world, knowing fully well that we will only end up as bitter people with a horrible reputation for ‘talking ill of others.’
We choose to separate the wheat from the chaff in people’s negative remarks about us and let that build us into better individuals or get angry about it all and let it spoil the rest of our week.
We choose to prepare for situations or wait until something happens then start panicking, groping for solutions.
We choose to live, smile, hope, belong and make a history worth telling our grandchildren about.
What choices will you make today?
