My life has been a series of high peaks and extremely dark valleys. I have lived in heaven and have wallowed in hell.
Yet I am still here.
More to the point, my life has been a life of beautiful rainbows and extremely slippery banana peels.
I’ve often found myself in a field of banana peels. Now there’s a rough place to get out of. The minute you get back on your feet—WHAM! You slip on another peel and back down you go. The trick is to not let the circumstances that landed you in that darn field get into the core of your being.
The bad news is that the entrance to the field disappears the minute you walk in. You can’t go back. The good news is that the exit is on the other side of the field.
The key is to rise above it and keep your eye on the edge of the field because that’s the way out. On hands and knees . . . one step at a time . . . I’ve crawled my way out of the insanity of the banana peel fields.
NO ONE is the same person when they get out. You are different. Your life is different.
So you escape the field and are high on a rainbow for a while. How spectacular! Your life is going smoothly, you’re in a great relationship, you have money, life is good and then . . .
Wait for it . . .
WHAM.
Back down you go.
What happened?
Rainbows are slippery! It takes work to stay on top of them. Be careful because when you slide off the rainbow, banana peels instantly appear all around you, and you often don’t see them until you are flat on your back. Again.
I’ve been there and done that a bunch of times. So many times you would think that I am pretty good at staying out of them.
Wrong.
Life has a way of hitting you from behind when you are not looking, and quite often it will knock you flat. The trick is to not stay there. You have to get up again. Don’t allow your circumstances to slip into your soul because, if you do, it’s really hard to get out of the banana peel field.
If you want to stay on the rainbow, then you have to believe that you CAN and think positively. Consistent negative thoughts such as “I’ll always be fat” or “I’ll never have enough money” will keep you in the banana peel fields.
At the end of the day, we come into this world alone and we leave alone, and along the way, we make decisions on how we want our life to play out. Some work, others don’t. Some raise us up on the rainbow, and others plunge us into the banana peel fields. The trick to life is to learn from your stay in the fields and try and stay on the rainbows for as long as possible.
That’s life, though, isn’t it? Life is filled with breathtaking rainbow moments and interminable journeys through the banana peel fields.
My biggest banana peel? Stage 3 breast cancer in 2012 at the age of fifty-one.
So how did I get through all these negative events in my life and still remain positive? Wasn’t always easy. Often it was a minute-by-minute choice.
Being positive is a lifestyle choice.
It’s a way of life that you choose.
Authors tend to be a skeptical lot having read much and, for some, having experienced, much. As for me, in spite of some serious slips along the way, for the most part, when I ventured out into the world that many feared for various (mostly ignorant) reasons, I found it wonderful, peaceful, and filled with adventure, rather than pain. Since negative tends to draw more attention than positive, our world is filled with negative information. The real world is just the opposite. So, I encourage people to ignore threats of potential banana peels and take a ride on some rainbows that they haven't, before.
Ron