Fresh Lemonade By Garrett Davis 

Keeping a positive outlook is easy.  It's easy when everything is going your way and only the most optimistic people surround you.  For the rest of the time, we'll need a solid plan. We'll need to know how we can turn those sour lemons into cool and tasty lemonade.  Simple.  Cut open, hold over a glass and squeeze.  Repeat until satisfied.
 
In between making all that delicious drink, you may also want to work on optimizing your mindset.  There is an odd facet of optimism, and it's that the more difficult it is to maintain a healthy outlook, the more important it is to do so.  When things turn sour the temptation will be to dwell in pity.  You may know that no one's going to show up for your pity party, but the temptation to throw one will be there anyways.  Feeling sorry for yourself is a lonely job.   
 
Should you choose to avoid the pity party route all together, you'll have to be able to maintain a presence that affords you an acute awareness of your thoughts.  You'll need to be able to recognize any mental shifts in the way of pessimism.  This takes practice.  The more you've practiced keeping an optimistic outlook, the more alert you'll be to any negative thoughts.  Pessimism can become a natural way of life for those who don't practice this type of awareness.  Some become so entrenched in pessimism that any hint of optimism is taken as an opportunity to become offended.  Do you know anyone like this?  The truth is that positivity just pisses some people off.  They just can't handle it because it's not congruent with they way they've chosen to think about life.  Optimism is taken as a threat to their ego.  
 
Just like making real pitcher of fresh lemonade, the process of generating a healthy outlook will require a bit of concentrated effort on your part.  Persistence will pay off.  Knowing that every minute counts is key.  When you're facing a tough situation, you can do yourself a lot of good by escaping the stress for even just a very small amount of time.  Make it your goal to ease your mind for just five minutes.  Take deep breaths while you mentally and physically relax.  Don't worry about making your mind blank, because thoughts will come.  Just focus on relaxing your mind.  Ask for help from source, from the universe, from God, or whatever in helping you to relax.  Hold this for as long as you can.  This is called meditation, and if you're not doing it you're seriously missing the boat.  
 
One of the great things about meditation is that it will bring you back to the present moment.  When you're worrying about something that might happen, you're not living in the present moment.  When you're dwelling on something that happened in your past, you're not living in the present moment.  Anticipate the future and dwell in the past and when will you ever make any time for the now?
 
Every adversity you've been through has helped to make you who you are today.  You won't negate that.  Everything that you've gone through up until now has been part of what makes you unique in your own way.
 
In the same way that your struggles have helped to make you who you are today, any fun, relaxing, uplifting situations work to make you who you are in the process of becoming.  The more you can create uplifting situations in your life, even for just minutes at a time, the brighter your situation becomes.  No happy experience is wasted. 
 
Your job in life will be to create as many good times for the greater good of all as is possible.
 
You'll only be able to produce good times if you're remaining active.  Remaining active is of paramount importance when you're struggling with something.  There will be no time in your life when consistent exercise will be more important than when you're struggling with grief.  Apathy may be tempting, but its effects are insidious.  Apathy can turn sadness into full-blown depression.  Depression can lead to further illness, disease, or even worse.  The tougher things get the more tempted you may be to give up on exerting yourself, but know that solace can be found in activity.
 
The speed at which you recover from hardship will be directly correlated to the rate at which you retain or increase activity. 
 
You may become tempted during tough times to take a rest, and that's fine, but it's paramount that you get right back to doing what you do. 
 
One of the best things you can do when trying to overcome grief or stress is to create new experiences for yourself.  New experiences will help to shift your mindset away from what you don't want and towards what is new, exciting and interesting.  Trying something you've always wanted to try can really do wonders in helping your to get yourself out of a painful rut.  So take that class, try that sport, or take that vacation.
 
When you change what you are physically doing, you change what you are mentally doing.  If you try enough new thoughts and actions, eventually you will not inhabit the same mind that was so rife with grief and stress.
 
Also, you may not know this, but alcohol is not actually an ingredient in fresh lemonade.  That's right, you won't be needing any bews at all, so put the vodka away.
 
Here's a tip that can save you a lot of grief:  Don't drink when you're having a tough time.  Sure, the temptation may be there, and we've been conditioned to believe that drinking relieves stress, but the truth is that alcohol is a depressant.  When you're feeling down, the last thing you'll want to do is to load your body up with a depressant.  This actually took me quite a while to figure out.  Alcohol will not make you feel better, it will make you feel worse.  If you drink heavily when you're sad, you're likely to slip into depression.  One of the most direct ways to ward off depression is to stop putting depressants in your body.  This is something that is so obvious once you've realized it, but it's easy to fall into thinking that a drink will make you feel better.  It won't.
 
Living in the moment, increasing activity, and embracing optimism are all things that will help you in overcoming hardship.  Hope will be your best friend.  Just remember that, "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change" ~ Wayne Dyer.  

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