Seeing as it’s St. Patricks day, it seemed only reasonable (at least in my mind) to talk about finding your luck, and no I don’t mean a pot of luck at the end of the rainbow.

Thinking about the things that have happened in my life in the past month and looking at people in general it’s often easier to focus on all the bad things that have happening in your life that we let all the good squeeze by without letting them sink in and truly experiencing them as they come. Days are clouded by mishaps that linger by and by taking away the joys that make themselves present for us on a daily basis.

Lately it seems like I’ve had days where everything is perfect and it only takes that one thing to mess them up – that one thing however, is more often than not something that can’t be very easily dismissed. Here’s some things that have happened in the past month:
– my car got towed from work
– I was out of gas in the highway stopped at one of the rest stops only to find my purse was gone
– my car engine almost exploded because the mechanics left my antifreeze cap off
– I dropped my phone in the toilet (again)
– someone hit my car while I was at work

So… That’s a lot of car troubles, right? And in case you’re wondering they were all for the most part resolved so reading this makes makes sound extremely whiny, but at the time I was DEVASTATED and it seemed like stuff was piling up higher than I could manage. (Sound familiar?)

This is when I decided to turn elsewhere for help because I didn’t think I could have one more bad thing happen to me or my head (and my bank account) might not make it. The first thing I did was burn sage all over my house, and while doing that I decided to clean up, which is when I stumbled into the book Siddartha by Hermann Hesse. Now, I read this book years ago but I’m a firm believer that what you take from a book is situational and varies depending on what is going on in your life at the time and since I’ve changed much since then I figured, why not? Anyways I came across some great messages and they really helped me rethink my situation.

“Alas Siddartha, I see you suffering, but you’re suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you’ll soon laugh for yourself”

All of the problems were temporary. They were most certainly inconvenient but nothing that couldn’t be fixed in time.

I also loved this quote.

“Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.”

Keeping calm during harsh times can be quite impossible but anger only clouds your judgment and really doesn’t help matters in the end and so this quote about taking it all in with no judgment and just waiting it out really hit home, after all complaining really doesn’t fix anything now does it?

All in all the book really helped me find peace within myself – though I’m in no way a master at it but I’m working on it daily. And while reading and finding my way into a happier life I started something that really helped change my outlook on these situations. I took a notebook and started writing down 5 good things that happened to me – daily. Sometimes they’re really insignificant like “no traffic on the way to work” sometimes a bit bigger like “got accepted to go to Israel on birthright” but either way, looking at concrete evidence of good things that happen to me daily helped me overlook the bad so that they’re easier to wait out and make me that much more thankful for the blessings I receive every day!