The Power of Perception

Life is what you make of it, and perception has a great deal to do with that. How you view a situation will nearly always determine how you react to it, even tho most of us will agree there are usually many sides to one coin.


Anyway, I recently realized that I had somehow been bitten by a negabug! I'm sorry to offend your english senses, that is my word for negitivity. Some made up words work, others, fail miserably...I think this one fails. So, I realized that I was viewing nearly everything through a negative light, including my new husband, and I couldn't figure out why life seemed so crappy! So many negative thoughts ran through my head such as "why doesn't he love me like he used to?". It wasn't that he didn't love me, or even that he'd changed at all, I was just viewing everything through this negative fog. It tainted everything! My job seemed dull, borring, and pointless. My kitten, which is the cutest cat I have ever had the privalege to love, seemed annoying and even vicious! And I was sitting in the midst of all of this negativity thinking..."wait, what happened!? My life was so great just a few months ago...where'd all that go!?"


Fortunately for me, God doesn't let me commiserate with myself for very long and my husband is in the Marine reserves, so occasionally, he's gone for a few days or a few weeks. Recently, he was gone for 2 weeks, and God used the opportunity to push a few buttons and pull a few strings! lol. I discovered, that I had unknowingly been reacting to expectations I wasn't aware of, in a manner I had seen modeled for me but never really identified. To be simple, I was projecting my perception of my parents relationship on my own...and being damn selfish in the process! My poor husband! He is so sweet, so kind, so thoughtfull, but I wasn't seeing hardly any of that...it didn't seem like enough! When I finally realized I'd been a completely selfish dolt, I cried and wondered if I'd already done too much damage. Thankfully, I hadn't, but I am a dramatic person and I am keenly responsive to domestic problems. Probably my biggest fear is that our hearts will be hardened to each other. People can be so mean to each other, without much provocation. But that is another post.

Long story short, after crying, repenting, and fretting about it all for a while...I woke up the next day with a new feeling of motivation. It was time to stop reacting, time to stop thinking about how life can satisfy ME, and time to START acting, to start stepping out towards those things I always dreamed of, to start serving others with my life while allowing them to enrich my own. That's what this blog came out of. I also took the motivation to write some more songs, and post them on youtube. If you go there please be kind...I'm still kind of warry of unkind remarks. The name is MaggieMaeH. But, the point of all of this, is that life looks so exciting now, exciting and new and surprising. I was challanged to dwell on only my husbands possotive qualities, and pretty soon I was forgetting what was such a problem, or seeing them as silly and unneccessary. Your whole opinion and outlook can change just by a slight change of perception! That's not to say you should try to make evil things appear good...actually the bible warns against that, but there is very often SOMETHING in life that is better than we make it out to be, and even just one thing, one possotive thing in your life, can make all the other bad stuff seem, less important, or at the very least, less discouraging.

Don't believe me? Try it! Try, for the entire day, to only think about possotive things. Can't do that? Then write a list of as many possotive things in your life as you can think of, about yourself, your spouse, your friends, your family, and read over it every day for a week. Just watch what happends! Even though life hasn't changed much, you'll feel so much lighter and happier! It's truly freeing, I only wish we humans weren't so prone to walk away...