I have been driving my daughter and her two friends to school each morning and found it to be a great time to share some daily life lessons. These girls are thirteen, at a pivotal age where everything and everyone around them is defining who they are becoming, who they are listening to and who they will follow. I figured this was a perfect opportunity to share with them good things every morning to start their day.

I figured maybe some of you may enjoy a few daily life lessons you could share with those you love–enjoy! I am going to put a few at a time and then post them, so take what you like and share them while you are driving your kids to games or dance lessons or share them around the dinner table or bed time. Good things are always good for the whole family. The whole world! Enjoy and share the inspiration.

GET GRATEFUL: This morning I shared with them a video clip of a girl who got cancer when she was nine & had to have her leg amputated, but what they did with part of her leg was inspired. Check it out.  

I also shared with them the story line of the movie, “Miracles from Heaven” which shared the story of a ten year old who got really sick from her lower intestines becoming paralyzed and how hard it must have been for her to not be able to eat real food. She had to be tube fed (through a tube down her nose) or supplemental pills.

I then shared with them how my niece (age 12) had just been to the dentist and was told she had 4 teeth that were like that of an 80 year old person and she would need to anticipate them falling out.

The Life Lesson: get grateful that you have a healthy body that can eat, that can run, walk, dance, rock climb, jump, and is capable of anything. We often take that for granted and waste our time, sit on our butts and don’t get outside and walk or take a bike ride or try something new. We take for granted our healthy bodies. I challenged them to remember that next time they were complaining of going on a walk or not wanting to do something active. They need to get grateful and get going!

 

EVERYONE HAS A CHOICE:  Life Lesson–You don’t have to do anything…you don’t have to be happy, you don’t have to be sad. It is a beautiful freedom to feel, be, do, say and become anything we want. We have a choice every day to decide the direction we want to go in–positive or negative. We decide how we react to any situation and we decide what we learn from every situation. We have a choice every single moment of our lives.

Velcro Story Swiss amateur mountaineer George de Mestral loved the outdoors and his daily walks with his dog. What he didn’t love was the burdock seeds that clung to his wool pants and his dog’s fur. He found the burs incredibly annoying until the day he wondered why they stuck.  By profession, George de Mestral was an engineer and inventor. He examined one of the burdock seeds under a microscope and was astonished by what he saw. The bur consisted of hundreds of tiny hooks that grabbed into the loops of thread in the material of his pants. This fool-proof, nature-made fastener became the inspiration for Mestral’s 1948 invention Velcro®.

Velcro® sales were somewhat slow the first couple of years, but Mestral never gave up and concentrated on tweaking his product to perfection. By 1955, over sixty million yards of Velcro® sold in that year alone making the inventor a very wealthy man.

So besides sharing with you this fascinating little piece of history, what’s the point? Attitude is the point, and the importance of having a good one. A person’s attitude toward their circumstances, toward their relationships, toward themselves, toward the planet, toward everything and everyone they come into contact with shapes their world and in turn, hands them their next set of circumstances and relationships. If a person’s attitude is negative, they will experience the circumstance or relationship as negative. In short, they will see nothing but “weeds.”

If a person’s attitude is positive and they are willing to look for the positive within every circumstance and relationship no matter what, then they will make Velcro® out of the weeds.

Adopt a Velcro® attitude about life and “stick” to it!  Copyright Mary M. Bauer.

 

A MATTER OF ATTITUDE: 

Thomas Edison’s laboratory was virtually destroyed by a fire in December, 1914. Although the damage exceeded $2 million, the buildings were insured for only $238,000 because they were made of concrete and thought to be fireproof. Much of Edison’s life’s work went up in spectacular flames that December night. At the height of the fire, Edison’s 24-year-old son, Charles, frantically searched for his father among the smoke and debris. He finally found him, calmly watching the scene, his face glowing in the reflection, his white hair blowing in the wind.

“My heart ached for him,” said Charles. “He was 67–no longer a young man–and everything was going up in flames. When he saw me, he shouted, ‘Charles, where’s your mother? When I tolld him I didn’t know, he said ‘Find her. Bring her here. She will never see anything like this again as long as she lives.”

The next morning, Edison looked at the ruins and said, “There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.”

*taken from Chicken Soup for the Soul 3

Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same. -francesca reigler

Life Lesson: No matter how bad things may seem or how hard life may get, your attitude makes all the difference. Thomas did not focus on all he had lost, he found great value in beginning again. It was how he chose to look at the disaster.

Well, continue to look for my posts called, ‘life lessons’ and enjoy the tidbits, the stories, the life lessons that inspire us daily.

Enjoy your day!!  -H