Sunday, July 5, 2009

Debbie Downer? Think Positive.

So often in life you can't really control the circumstances you face; all you can control is your own attitude in dealing with those circumstances. I am a believer in the power of positive thinking, but of course I don't always live up to the ideal.

After Georgia was diagnosed with food allergies, I picked up a copy of this magazine in Whole Foods:

I don't know why, but the name of this publication just cracks me up. It seems like kind of a downer way of looking at life with allergies. Maybe it was just this particular issue, though, with the somewhat drab looking photo of various breads. (I really don't mean to knock this thing overall, because I'm sure the magazine contains useful, informative stuff, and I have seen other issues with much more colorful, catchy cover photos. I'm all for any reading materials on the market that help allergy sufferers and non-allergic folks alike learn more about this stuff.) Anyway, I still think the name is funny.

Contrast that with this logo:


Enjoy Life is a brand of snacks and cookies specifically designed for people with food allergies. Kudos to whoever did their branding, because I find this name to be so much more positive. A refreshing reminder that living with food allergies doesn't mean you can't enjoy life to the fullest.

And just to crank up the cheese quotient of this post, here are a couple of parting quotations about optimism and the power of positive thinking (all of which were of course cut and pasted from websites that I don't know the reliability of, so apologies to the original authors if these have been butchered!):

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want. ~Oscar Wilde


I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains. ~Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy. ~Eudora Welty

Don't grieve that your roses have thorns. Rejoice instead that your thorns have roses! ~(Not sure who...found this unattributed quotation on the web)

And the capper:

I wish I was a glow worm,
A glow worm's never glum.

'Cos how can you be grumpy

When the sun shines out your bum!

~Author Unknown

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