put your good thoughts ahead of your bad ones

As I have done every year since I was in 4th grade, I have re-started my Kids-Thot-a-Day Calendar—a little flip book my Grandma and Grandpa Callahan got for me. {You can read more about it here, if you're so inclined. And bonus! There's a poem in that post, too! This is only a bonus if you like poetry, I know.}

It's chock-full of pithy little sayings, and every morning before I leave for the gym, I flip the page to see what the day has in store for me.

I don't believe in horoscopes {although I will admit that there have been some I've read that are frighteningly accurate. But how, I always wonder, can it be accurate for all the other Sagittarians? How are we all having the same day, considering that we're all so different?}.

But my Kids-Thot-a-Day works a horoscope-like charm on me. I look at it and can sense, somehow, how my day might go.

Take yesterday for example. At 5:30 yesterday morning, I read, "Put your good thoughts ahead of your bad ones."

And I prayed: Oh dear Lord, if it turns out that I need that reminder 3 hours from now or 6 hours from now, please bring this moment back to me.

I did, and he did.

I wanted so badly to focus on what was wrong: Clunky interactions with friends {that leave me feeling like a lead balloon rather than, you know, the buoyant kind of normal balloon}. How I haven't finished my birthday and Christmas thank you cards yet. How my desk is a mess at work, indicative, of course, of the piles of work I have to do.

But I remembered my Kids-Thot-a-Day, and I started to mentally move all those bad thoughts to the back of the line.

As silly as it sounds, my thoughts were actually forming a line in my head. They'd all taken on just the right kind of object to represent them—the work to-do list became my laptop, see—and they were finding their place in the priority line.

This all, by the way, was taking place in Central Park. It was better and certainly prettier than having my thoughts line up at the DMV or some other familiar and hellish place to be in a line.

With all my thoughts lined up—the good ones ahead, just where my Kids-Thot-a-Day told me to put them—I returned from Central Park to my cubicle and even managed to smile at the messiness.