Sunday, February 22, 2009

That's My Story

And I'm sticking to it.
You have your stories, too. We all do.
It's not the events of our lives that give us pleasure or pain. It's the stories we hold about those events.
Take rainy days, for example. My story is that rainy days are great. Your story may be that rainy days are horrible. My story calms. Your story doesn't.
On hot, dry Santa Ana type days I have a different story which neither calms nor inspires. I've chosen that summer story. It's hard to let go of stories we've held for so long.
We choose our stories.
My story is that we will recover from this current economic challenge. The media chooses to tell a different story.
We choose our stories. We also choose whether or not to believe the stories we hear and make them our own.
I'm choosing more and more to not listen to the stories of impending disaster and collapse and ruin.
My story is that classical music inspires more optimism than the onslaught of radio and television news.
I'm sticking to that story.

3 comments:

Marnie said...

I'm for the classical music myself and choose to look at positive although the media sure would like us to be pessimistic so we would read or listen to the onslaught of terrible news. It's enough to drive us all crazy - crazy - mind you!

Tom Walker said...

On the other hand, I now have a whole bunch of new movies to see, like "Slumdog Millionaire," "The Reader," "Milk," "Fever Heat," and all the rest. So that should help me avoid the economic bad news for several weeks. Life is good.

MaryWalkerBaron said...

And the one movie that will see you through it all is, of course, Fever Heat. It's deep yet accessible message speaks a universal truth.