The Morning After

Your sugar high is winding down, the eggs have all been found, and you’ve awakened to the morning after. It doesn’t have to feel like a bad thing, though. It should feel more like the beginning of something fresh and wonderful. Every morning has the potential to be be the best day yet, even a Monday morning!

So how do you get your coffee-in-hand, dazed news-watching self focused on a positive rather than a negative outlook? You make that choice. You commit a random act of kindness, or even reward yourself in some small but smile-on-your-face way. Or, if you would never have dared before, you make a life change everyone thinks is risky or daring, or exciting in an ‘I wish I had the nerve to do that’ way. Live your life with deliberation rather than apathetic existence.

Reality TV has become the norm. Why? Because for some reason mind-dulled, apathetic people who have come to just accept and ignore the mundane sameness of each “new” day crave a vicarious adventure of out-of-the-ordinary proportions. Some are heartwarming and offer hope to those with a sense of mass hopelessness in a failing economy, such as The Biggest Loser where those who have given up on themselves receive the help and encouragement they need to take control of their own lives. Some are spectacular makeover shows for deserving, but struggling families, such as Extreme Makeover, where they demolish the family home and rebuild it from the ground up, creating the perfect, customized home. Still others are bizarre, filled with fringe-dwellers and social outcasts or outlaws, like Dog, The Bounty Hunter, or Jerry Springer. They make people feel good about their own lives because they are at least better, in their minds, than the dysfunctional, sad segments of other people’s lives they view.

Doing nothing more than watch these shows to make life a little better through someone else’s reality is like putting a bandaid on a severed artery. Sooner of later, there’s no life-sustaining blood left. Don’t exist until you expire. Live your life to the fullest! Cliche’? Maybe. But it’s also profoundly true. So reconnect with a forgotten hobby or friend. Do that thing you always wanted to, but “gave up” because paying bills and changing diapers began to define who you were instead of some of the things you do.

Make the morning afer the first day of the rest of your life!