Hi everybody and welcome to “Beautiful Monday”, “positive food for thought” for all of us at the beginning of the week.
This series shares points of view, tidbits, perspectives and philosophies that you might find helpful.
Sometimes we struggle, feel overwhelmed or just generally feel like we need a bit of a lift, and this intended to do some of the lifting for you. I have a bunch of things that I use to keep myself afloat, and what I’d like to do is to just share one of those with you each week.
Sometimes I’ll have a guest, and I’ve really enjoyed interviewing inspirational people. I just want to keep it as natural as possible and as helpful as possible.
For the first session I would like to share a piece of wisdom from Helen Keller that I heard years ago. I found it really helped me.
Helen Keller was an inspirational character for lots of reasons. She was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Now upon googling this to make sure I had it right for you, it turns out what I’ve been saying to myself isn’t the original quote, if Google could be trusted, so I’ll tell you the proper quote first.
This is a famous quote of hers, she says, “Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows.”
I just found that incredibly beautiful. “Keep your face to the Sun and you’ll never see the shadows.”
As I mentioned, the version that I remembered was slightly different “When you face the Sun, the shadows always fall behind you.”
And that’s something that I’ve said to myself a lot. I think on reflection I probably prefer that version. What it says to me is that there’s an element of choice. When YOU face the Sun, the shadows fall behind you.
This obviously isn’t just about whether or not it’s sunny. Something I’ve noticed, certainly myself and other people, is that we do have a tendency to focus on negative things. It can be really habit forming to focus on negative things. It’s easy to do that; it’s really easy to do that, and it can weigh you down, affect the decisions that you make, affect your choices and the way that you approach everything.
Generally, I find life quite a turbulent time. There are ups and downs that are quite extreme in my life. A lot of that is self-inflicted because of the choices that I have made so I do take responsibility for that, but this is something that really helps me when I’m feeling like everything is overwhelming and getting a bit much. This is something that I say to myself. When you face the Sun the shadows always fall behind you. That element of choice to me is what says turn around. turn around and look. look at the Sun and look at the positive things, count the things that you have got, do the things that you can do. don’t just stand in the shadows and feel cold and sad.
So, that’s just a bit of “food for thought” for you for this week. I hope that you’ll find this interesting. I’m just going to keep it short.
In the future, I’ll be sharing things from the arts – the philosophy of Joni Mitchell obviously is very helpful, song lyrics and that kind of thing, but also things from people you know like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and these wise and influential characters, as well as some of the smaller things.
So this week, spare a thought for Hellen Keller. I hope that helps you and that you find that interesting and thanks for watching. Until next week, take care.
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