Attitude Determines Outlook

I have a book about some of the best travel stories for a certain year, and in one of them there is a passage that I thought was extremely interesting. It deals with some of the hardships that come with travel (especially a more extreme version of travel than most of us do)... and the difference in attitude that the author had as compared to the person he was writing about. He wrote:

"Thubrun is a modest and undemonstrative fellow, but he grew animated as he described for me the pleasures of spending weeks sleeping on hard floors, eaing strange and stringy foods, being days beyond the reach of editors and friends. I had always thought of that type of discomfort and dislocation as the price you paid to experience interesting places, but not part of the pleasure. For Thubron it was - he positively rejoiced in it - and for me it was the greatest revelation."

We see in this paragraph the difference that your attitude can have on a situation. On the one hand, the author thought of these types of things as necessary evils, unpleasant but something you had to go through. His friend had the opposite reaction. He looked at them as another adventure, another experience to be lived. It is not hard to guess who enjoyed the seemingly negative side effects of traveling more.

In the same way we can see things in our own life. We can see those unpleasantries as a burden to be overcome, or as part of the joy in living life and growing as a person.

For every time someone cuts you off in traffic, it can be a [very, very] frustrating experience, or it can be a time to grow in patience and understanding.

For every time something does not go your way or how you had planned it, you can view it as an annoyance and frustration, or you can view it as a learning experience and a chance to make something better of the situation.

Trying to find the bright side of any situation is going to make us much happier, much more pleasant people. We will be better friends, better co-workers, and just simply better people. A positive attitude breeds a positive outlook, and that makes all the difference.