“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” -Albert Ellis

Henry Ford was right when he said, “There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.” Some days, or even weeks, they just stack up; one little problem on top of the next. Then they all start to run together. Teasing them apart, trying to figure out which one needs answering first and how to move on one piece when the other part is still not working… these are the complexities of dealing with life. Just look at Toyota, little problems magnified by millions. There was no malicious intent, just too many problems to solve.

I have been diligent in my positivity quest in spite of the road blocks to my product re-branding dreams and bearing the weight of too many teenagers in one house. As I mentioned yesterday, it is starting to weigh on my central nervous system. Stillness is hard to come by, even in my meditations. I can think it but can’t really feel it. I continue to practice anyway, because even un-inspired meditation time is better than none at all. The hollowness of the expereince, I found out today is not really mine alone.

Even with the gratitude journal, and the wristband approach to negative talk and thinking, today I recognized a negative pattern in problem solving that I never was able to see clearly before. Try as I might this last week of fine tuning the art of holding on and letting go in life, I have actually been undermining the outcomes I am working towards with my disbelief in my own control of my destiny. Insidious belief systems are like that, they silently pattern your brain, closing you off from seeing other solutions and from trusting what you cannot see.

When negativity is built into the synaptic connections in problem solving, even as I work toward the solution, my nerves, anxiety and energy surround my efforts like a barbed wire fence. It is the doorstep to defeat and today I got a first row seat into how I put myself there. My husband says, replace negativity with fatigue, the result is the same. “Some days, the stress and effort is too much, just go for neutral,” he says. “Neutral can be positive, too.”