Accentuate the positive …

My resistance must be lower than normal.  Either that or for some reason I’m being tested.  Because I can’t remember any other time in my life when absolutely everything I tried to do turned out to be unnecessarily challenging, difficult, trying and frustrating.  But that’s the way it’s been lately.  Jeez!

Thankfully I’ve got some very good friends who are okay with me calling and venting, getting it off my chest.  That and I’ve been taking one helluva lot of deep breaths, let me tell you.

Rather than dwell on it though, I’ve decided that every day I’m going to think of something good, something positive, something to be grateful for.  No, no, no, not the obvious, you know, for my parents, for my family, for my career, for waking up in the morning. Of course I’m grateful for all that, and more, but what I’m talking about are all those things we never think about, never notice or acknowledge.

Like, for example, how delicious an ever-so-slightly-salty piece of almost translucent, melt-in-your-mouth-tender prosciutto is, especially when it’s wrapped around a plump, ripe, silky, sweet, fresh fig.  And lucky, lucky me, I’ve got both waiting for me, right now, in my kitchen.  Can you guess what I’m having for lunch today?

So if our taste buds aren’t something to be grateful for, what is?

Can you imagine how boring life would be if everything just tasted like wood shavings?  If nothing tasted salty or spicy or sour or sweet?  If we couldn’t tell the difference between cashews and walnuts, between tomatoes and apples, between cinnamon and cumin, between scotch and rum, between coffee and tea?

Can you imagine how unsatisfying it would be to get no pleasure what so ever out of eating which, without taste buds, would be the case?  It’d be pretty awful I reckon.

I worked with a woman who lost her sense of smell from chemo.  It never came back.  She told me how difficult it was to buy fruit because the way she could always tell if a melon was ripe or not, was by smelling it.

Give that some thought the next time something doesn’t go your way.