Bird & Sunrise photo

Bird & Sunrise photo
Because "someday" is today!

Friday, December 23, 2016

Lost your joy?


 
"A Joyful Heart" 7"x 6" watercolor on paper ©2016 Tina M. Welter Drawing of a happy cat playing with red Christmas tree ornaments.
"A Joyful Heart" 7"x 6" watercolor on paper ©2016
I don’t know about you, but I can get completely overwhelmed and burned out on all the horrible and ugly things going on in the world. 

“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

Sure we may laugh, but for years I have been secretly hoping it wasn’t true! I don’t think I am alone here. Many of us expect life to be much better than it is and then feel really upset and disappointed when our lives take unexpected turns or our fellow humans keep doing really awful things.

I admit, most of my life I have been a “cup half empty” type of person. I never realized until lately that I had this negative point of view because I was expecting life and people to be better! You would think as an amateur student of history I wouldn't be so clueless.

The irony is that finally accepting that life is often hard and painful and really difficult at some point for everyone has actually helped me feel happier. If the norm is pain and difficulty, then perhaps anything in my life that isn’t painful and difficult is beating the odds and deserves to be celebrated!

I am noticing more that even on my difficult days, I have a lot of reasons to celebrate!                                                                    

Don't get me wrong, I still believe that anything we can do to ease the pain and suffering in the world is worth doing and if I look at the big picture of history, mankind has actually made some progress.

I have also learned that being on full anxiety alert all the time isn't healthy for me or anyone else. It is necessary to regularly take a break from the hard realities and lift my own heart. 
 
"A Joyful Heart" 3"x 2.75"sketch, pen on paper ©2014 Tina M. Welter Sketch of a cat playing with the Christmas tree ornaments.
"A Joyful Heart" 3"x 2.75" pen on paper sketch ©2014
One thing I like about cats is their sense of fun. They can find the most ordinary things fascinating and delightful, i.e. boxes, crumpled paper, a marble under the fridge, and the joy of joys, ornaments on a Christmas tree. They seem completely engrossed and happy in getting that shiny, swinging thing off of the tree! 

What is your shiny ornament on a Christmas tree? Have you ever thought about it?

My equivalent of batting around the Christmas tree ornaments is playing the guitar badly and singing along. Singing brings me so much joy, but the crazy thing is I often don’t do enough of it, unless I actually put in on my to do list! Ridiculous, right? 
This month I have been singing Christmas songs. I would like to leave you with this one in which I made some changes to the lyrics. 

1.     Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
        let your heart be light,
        even though our troubles are well in sight.
2.     Have yourself a merry little Christmas
        make the Yuletide gay,
        even though our troubles are here to stay.

Once again we will hold the day, each golden day is ours.
Faithful friends who are dear to us,
Will hear from us once more.

 3.   Maybe soon we all will be together,
        if the fates allow,
        until then we’ll bless the life we live somehow.
        so have yourself a merry little Christmas now!

>^-^<
Tina

My apologies to Hugh Martin who wrote the lyrics originally for the 1944 movie “Meet Me in St. Louis” starring Judy Garland. Mr. Martin claims that Ralph Blane didn't have anything to do with the lyrics...but that is another story.
 Check out the interesting history of this song on wikipedia here.

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