Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

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Life is hard, fragile, breathtaking, and can sometimes come at us fast.

We all have choices, even when we believe we don't. This has been one of the hardest lessons for me to learn in life. During the times the brain has gone wobbly, when events seem to be conspiring against me, just as I believed I was on my own in the universe with only one path before me, I remembered I had the choice about how I thought and reacted to everything.

The very phrase, "always look on the bright side of life", would annoy the bejeesus out of me, "always", "bright", ah fuck off you don't know me and what I have to put up with, just piss off with your happy clappy platitudes!

In would pop the song. 
I'd have a little whistle.
A smile, a breath, and a relax.

That fun song by Eric Idle (created during script writing with vocals re-recorded in a mattress fort inside a Tunisian hotel room) does actually nail it - we do have a choice:
What have you got to lose?
You know, you come from nothing
You're going back to nothing
What have you lost? Nothing!
I have written about 'choice' previously, however my lodestone is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning (1946), in which he chronicles his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose to each person's life. I could, but won't, dump a tonne of quotes, but let's leave it with just this one:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
If you're ever stuck assuming you have no choices then I urge you to buy / borrow this book.

Life is indeed hard, fragile, breathtaking, and does come at us fast, but it's our life and fuck the wobbly brain, the events, and the appearances, we are all worth it all and then some, our choice is to live, laugh, and love - take that universe.

And whistle!


56: A physical fight has no rules" >

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