La Vie en Rose-Colored Glasses

I'm going to start off with a confession.  I love Oprah.  I wish she was my friend.  I love her activism in human rights and I love the fact that for Christmas she gives her friends books as gifts.  I love that she is sometimes overweight, a couple of times underweight, and always honest about her struggle.  I love that when I watch her TV show, she makes me feel like her girlfriend, like I could call her up and ask for help and she'd give it in a heartbeat.  I think I would have cried the day her show went off the air if I didn't know she now has her OWN network (see what I did there?), and I can always read her magazine.  Which brings me to the subject of this blog.  Waxing eloquent on my love for Oprah was simply a digression.  :)
Last week I read an article in the September issue of O Magazine.  Its title? In Praise of Rose-Colored Glasses. What I found so wonderful about this article was its encouragement to the optimists in the world.  I try (and sometimes fail, I'll be honest) to be a "glass-half-full" kind of girl.  I choose not to be a doom and gloom, "the world is ending and there's nothing I can do about it" kind of girl. I'm incapable of giving up hope on love, hope for the human condition, hope that life will turn out as I dream it will.  And this article is saying its that kind of thinking that leads to change in the world. The author, Martha Beck, calls it becoming a "walking cyclone of peace".  She says "the repercussions of one person living in a stubborn acceptance of gladness are incalculably positive."  
So after reading this article (which you should read!) I've decided to take a note from the author and add 5 Bright Spots in my day to the end of every post for the foreseeable future.  Its my little way off reminding myself and you that even when life gets discouraging, and it seems like the world is going to hell in a hand basket, there is still sunshine to be found.  And if I find it and share it with you, then it gets brighter and maybe, just maybe, we can change the world.  
Bright Spots for Today:
1. Coffee and Kathy Riechs - the best way to start my day
2. I found a third roommate and don't have to worry (so much) about money anymore.
3. Jesus loves me.  Always a bright spot.
4. I'm making a new friend who is able and willing to encourage me in my new "wheel life"
5. The weather was not over 100degrees today.  Praise Jesus!

I leave you with this poem by Jack Gilbert, also quoted in the article I read.  I think it is beautiful.  It doesn't deny that the world is ugly, but simply reminds us that it is beautiful too, and even those who are suffering more than you and I find reasons to laugh.  I encourage you to start viewing the world with slightly more rosy glasses.  Choose to find joy and then share it. 

“A Brief for the Defense”
Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.