Negative tornadoes, yeah they suck, but you have to keep on keepin' on!

Happy Monday Evening! Sorry that you didn’t have a blog post when you woke up this morning, but my day has just about started backwards. I have had the case of the “Monday’s.” Yes even I have those days that are not so perfect, but that is life, right? So as I start my 10,080 minute week with my “Happiness Tank” on empty, I sit down at my writer’s desk to do something that makes me happy. I sit and write a blog post that brings me close to my readers and allows me to share a part of me and that is happiness to me at the highest level.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good movie and I often quote a good movie in general conversation. I have been known to read the screenplay after watching a great movie. I love to feel the words themselves without any Actor/Actress interpretation. I often do this to a great song listening to the song and then searching out the lyrics so I can hear the poetry of the words. Sorry I am getting off topic here. Tonight while cruising Facebook, I come across a post from a friend of the family who is around thirteen. Her post read “I'm done with everyone and everything.”  Oh how many times I have said that said that as I lay on my back on the virtual boxing mat of this thing we call life looking up at the ceiling. In typical fashion, I thought of a movie quote from A Good Year (2006) where Albert Finney’s character Uncle Henry Skinner says “You'll come to see that a man learns nothing from winning. The act of losing, however, can elicit great wisdom. Not least of which is, uh... how much more enjoyable it is to win. It's inevitable to lose now and again. The trick is not to make a habit of it.”

When we are teenagers it is hard to see past the very hour that we are living in and it doesn’t get any easier when we become adults.  We have talked for a couple of weeks about the importance of being happy, choosing to be happy, refilling our “Happiness Tanks” and steering away from negative situations. Those are great blog post, but in honor of my friend Haley and my exceptionally bad day today I wanted to take a slightly different approach this week. We will entitle this week as “Life Freaking Sucks Sometimes.” That was for you Haley. Sometimes we can do everything we can think of to keep ourselves on the positive straight and narrow, but without notice a negative storm creeps up on us. Before we know it, we are in the midst of a negative tornado and we have no idea how we got there or how we are going to get out.

Negative tornadoes, yeah they suck, but you have to keep on keepin' on! I know that most of you were looking for something more profound than that, but sometimes there are no magic words. Sometimes the only option we have is to batten down the hatches and ride the storm out. Sometimes it is just you and the storm with no magic wands or great inspiring words to carry you through. We just have to pray and pull from our past experiences, because sometimes it is like Linus Roache’s character Thomas Wayne said in the 2005 movie Batman Begins “And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” Sometimes that storm is just a test and on the other side is validation for all you have been through.

So to Haley and all my friends and family that are in the midst of a negative tornado right now, hold the faith. Be strong, be wise, and keep on keepin’ on, because that is what winners and successful people do. They survive.