How do I change my attitude to life?

And for us in Australia, spring and summer coincide with Christmas.  Life is like being surrounded with gift-wrapped presents.  They all have potential, but which one will you open first?

Do you become excited when you open gift-wrapped presents?

How would it be to have the same attitude about your life?

Do you grab the biggest gift, rip the wrapping off and dive in excitedly, to see what’s inside?

Do you prefer to take a safer option: open the least appealing one first, so that you still have the more appealing one to look forward to?

Or do you like to sit and look at them, not daring to open any, because you don’t know what they might contain?

Or maybe you sit there and think: ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll get around to it another time.’

Attitude to life can be a challenge.

Sometimes we don’t have the courage to ‘open’ the opportunities life offers.

I’ll never forget a woman in one of my cookery classes years ago.  The classes consisted of my demonstrating how to make a dish, and then participants would taste it and decide if they would enjoy making it at home.

One woman consistently refused to taste anything over the series of classes.  I asked her if her concerns were religious—no.  Hygiene?  No.  Dietary requirements?  No, Special likes or dislikes…I could leave the mushrooms out? No.

‘So—why don’t you want to taste anything?’

‘In case I don’t like it’, she said.

‘But there’s an equal chance that you will like it!’

I couldn’t budge her.  Wondering why she’d come to a cookery class in the first place, I left her alone. How sad, I thought, to go through life with an attitude that it’s not worth taking even the tiniest chance, in case we’re disappointed.

Attitude to life is essential in getting what you want.

What if you can’t get what you need?

There was a time when I couldn’t afford to buy a Christmas tree and I especially wanted to have one that year, because a friend was coming to visit with her children.

Time for creativity!  I collected small branches and twigs that had fallen on the ground and put them in a tall spaghetti jar in a pine-tree shape.

On the twigs, I tied red ribbons, little red and white striped peppermint sticks, and tiny wooden ornaments I’d collected over the years.  Red crepe paper tied around the jar with a dark green ribbon completed the look.

The joyful reaction I got from people who saw my creative tree made me decide to stay with the twig idea rather than be traditional.