Attitude Rules!

It was one of those 'Full glorious mornings', the kind that 'flatter the mountain-tops', and 'kissing with golden face the meadows'. I've heard Ms. Wonder say it often. I don't know how she comes up with these things, but it makes me happy every time she says it. She should have her own blog.

But despite all the flattering and kissing the sun was doing, I wasn't happy. I woke up feeling like I'd been abducted by space aliens, poked, prodded, and then disassembled and poorly reassembled by an untrained UFO crew, and then dropped from a considerable height for good measure.

It wasn't surprising; I'd suffered from environmental allergies for weeks. First came pollen--flowering plants, followed by pine pollen, followed by live oak and Spanish moss. By the end of the first two weeks, I'd had the maximum dose for the average adult, and now I was just a teeny bit panicky, thinking my real problem might be hiding underneath the allergies, like anchovies in the Caesar salad.

I had no energy; I felt lethargic--too peaky to even go outside; hell, I couldn't walk down the hallway without careening off the walls. I decided it was all too much for me, so I took it to a higher power. Fortunately, Ms. Wonder maintains an open-door policy for me.

I wasted no time complaining, squawking, and grumbling about how bad I felt. I'm not certain that I didn't kvetch. Hell, I even had a headache, something not part of the standard issue for me. 

As I walked to the bedroom, I thought about how I'd been the picture of health only two weeks ago, and now I had one foot in the cemetery. It was a grating thought, leaving me with a feeling of loss. It was a Sugar Mountain feeling--the feeling Neil Young sang about.

Suddenly, something popped! I remembered how it felt in thrid grade to be sat on by Butch Mason and have pine straw shoved into my face. Those memories brought back my life-long motto, 'I will not eat pine needles!' I decided to shower, shave, and get dressed. Out in the sunshine and fresh air, I felt on top of the world. I was the old Genome again--the one I knew so well, and it lasted throughout the day.

Before bed, I mentally replayed my day and realized that I was depressed when I awoke. I was so depressed that it affected me physically. When I walked through my memory of the events of the day, I realized it wasn't the walk that reversed my despair. It wasn't even the shower. I restarted my day the instant I decided to make the best of the moment. 

The magic elixir that turned the night into day was attitude. It always works for emotional transformation, but how effective is it for physical healing? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.