Optimism, laughter, and good news:

"Now I understand
It represents joy.
I work towards Joy.
I strive for it.
I strive
For more imperfection.
The striving
Is not easy."

Over the past few weeks I've again been finding the striving to be more difficult. Though I used to have patience in abundance it has diminished in quantity over the past years. I find I need to remind myself often to try to practice it. Trying to find suitable work, especially something I will enjoy, waiting to see if my writing will be accepted for publication and issues surrounding our daughter's future school years leave me reaching towards the panic button very often.
Reminding myself to practice patience, to exercise trust and to look to joy need to become higher priority. I learnt a time ago to not listen to news and to try to find more laughter in life. But how often we forget. I actually asked my husband to put http://www.inspirationpeak.com/ as our home page. I had still been finding myself reading the bad news every time I opened to the internet. I had determined ages ago to not put myself in contact with the bad news as I would choose that negative path more readily. Choosing inspiration peak for our homepage has been a wonderful choice.

You might think I am negligent for not keeping up with current affairs. So be it. I believe if it is something terribly important or of interest to me I will find out about it in some way or another. For instance I am aware there was a small tsunami just a few days ago. My dear husband told me of it.

But I think we should try to laugh much more. I find little opportunity to have a heartfelt belly laugh. I had read or heard about the practice of someone placing their head on top of someone's tummy and so on. The person at the bottom of the heap starts to laugh and then the others cannot help but laugh also. This is something else I wish I would think of more often and take time to do. Or I could try to remember to go to http://www.healingwithhumor.com/ and click on "need a laugh right now". Another good plan is to check out http://www.snoopy.com for an occasional laugh or two. I've just decided we should put their screensaver up so that I can see the gang playing ball instead of a lot of little squares on a green background whenever I might NOT be sitting at the computer and happen to walk by.

Finally about the news - if you absolutely must get some news regularly, why not bookmark http://www.happynews.com which I read about in the May issue of Real Simple (http://www.realsimple.com/realsimple/homepage/flash/0,23022,,00.shtml)?

Keep laughing.