Being back

As you may have noticed, I've been giving the blog a rest. When I started this, it wasn't my intention to negatively review life in Trinidad but in the last few months, that's what it started turning into. Not that actively commenting on the problems, issues and situations that occur here is a bad thing, but really, it was beginning to get to the point where it was dragging me down. Nowhere is perfect but maybe I am too close to the ground, it's hard to accept some of the these things.

Going away last week, I found out how tired I was, of everything. The break was very welcome though not long enough. Two days back on the job feels like there was no break at all, you being to actively question why? I think it's about being slowly but inexorably ground down by the mechanics of living. All those days with no water and not knowing when it was coming back, power outages, traffic and more traffic, waiting and waiting for service. Various friends who'd been victims of some crime or other, or subjected to shootouts on their street, innocent bystanders. The newspapers with the count of who's dead, inflation, always the bad news. How many more friends and relatives felled by bad health care? Being accosted by the every growing number of vagrants. Constantly feeling unsafe. How much more to stomach?

This is not who I want to be, always the negative. This year I returned to Sarah ban Breathnach's Simple Abundance. It was a book that helped me though a tough time in life and for some odd reason hadn't really looked at since. It's easy to discount self help books or scoff at things as being new age, but I've always believed that we are responsible for our own recovery, whatever it takes. Simple Abundance is about learning to recognise the positive things in your life. I've found that it's easy to blame depression for all my ills, after all if I'm sick then I'm not responsible for my actions, it becomes easy to accept that as an excuse for a lot of actions as opposed to saying okay, maybe this is my own negative attitude or fuckup. I'm not saying that's what everybody else does, this is just about me.

Sure all the stuff mentioned above are valid but how about all the other things that do work? So I've started writing down my five things every night, the positive things that happened to me today or came into my life. Even those days when there don't seem to be nothing, I list things like my health, dog, roof over my head and you know what, it makes a difference. If you only ever see the negative things in life that's all you're ever going to get. If anything is going to change, I'm going to have to open myself to the possibilities, so here's what universe, ready and waiting. Bring it on.