Many things can change and transform your life: a positive attitude, yoga, beneficial herbs, aromatherapy, bodywork, supplements, super foods, and meditation; now we are going to talk about a few more offbeat fun things you may want to investigate. There are many, many more, but I am limiting the list to things I have personally tried.

Astrology

This is a really fun way to gain insight into your innate qualities. I had my chart done by an astrologer in Boulder. Essentially, astrology uses a birth chart as a map of the positions of the planets, in relation to where you were born, and the exact time. The chart uses the angular relationships of the planets and the different signs of the zodiac, where they fall in accordance to the chart, to decipher indicators to see different potentials in you as an individual.

It helps you to explore your own potentials and innate traits, and to see how the different facets of your personality are integrated. When I had mine done, I could more clearly see some of the quirks of my personality and the relationship between them and my life. It cost $80, but that was Boulder and the astrologer I saw is widely known and respected. It can be done for as little as $10 through the mail.

Palm reading

This was a lot of fun too. I had it done a few years ago out of the back of a coffee shop in North Denver. The guy was really good. I was in my mid-thirties at the time and he said my life was really going to start in my early forties. That was fun to think about and look forward to.

Tarot

I had this done quite recently and it wasn’t that much fun for me because it scared me. It was the same guy who read my palm years ago. I had to go to the bookstore three times and ask different people about him in order to find him. I knew he did astrology and tarot, too, and I wanted to check out what the cards had in store for me.

I don’t know if it was my age, 39, which makes people somewhat predictable in terms of the kind of things they are thinking about, such as life evaluation: Am I happy with my life? Where have I been for the entire first half of my life? Did I accomplish what I thought I might? What are my regrets? What are my hopes for the future? What changes do I need to make the difference? Forty is a big milestone, and no matter who you are, you are going to be asking yourself these kinds of questions.

The tarot reader knew my birthdate, and his best friend for the last twenty years, a woman, was born two days before me. So he may have just had me pegged. Even the things he may have been wrong about, he seemed so sure of that I tended to believe him instead of my own instinct. And let’s not underestimate the obviousness of someone going to have their cards read anyway; it clearly states you are questioning things in your life.

But self-knowledge is an adventure. I intend to try more. How about you?

Positive Thinking

Persistence is what makes the impossible possible, the possible likely, and the likely definite.

—Robert Half

From Joe Griffith, Speaker’s Library of Business Stories, Anecdotes and Humor (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), comes the following information:

• R. H. Macy failed seven times before his store in New York succeeded.
• Novelist John Creasey got 753 rejection slips before he published the first of his 564books.
• Thomas Edison was thrown out of school in the early grades when the teachers decidedhe could not do the work.
• Harry S. Truman failed as a haberdasher.
• When Bob Dylan performed at a high school talent show, his classmates booed him off the stage. [I don’t find that one so hard to believe.]
• W. Clement Stone, successful insurance company executive and founder of Success magazine, was a high school dropout.

I was kicked out of high school so many times that I was too embarrassed to return.

Inspirational writer Charles Swindoll tells us, “Courage is not limited to the battlefield or the Indianapolis 500 or bravely catching a thief in your house. The real tests of courage are much quieter. They are the inner tests, like remaining faithful when nobody’s looking, like enduring pain when the room is empty, like standing alone when you’re misunderstood.”

Billy Wilder recommends that you “trust your instincts. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s.”

You will not succeed at anything in life without a positive attitude. Pessimists may be right more of the time, but optimists enjoy life more of the time. Maybe I am just blessed or lucky, but I just can’t stand to be miserable. If something sad happens to me, I get depressed and cry, but then I try to find a method or mechanism to deal with it. Because I can’t stand to be unhappy, I am not that much of the time. When something goes wrong, no matter how badly, I keep working to find the silver lining.

When my parents were in the automobile accident in which my dad died, I was sitting in the airport, waiting for my connecting plane. There were several airport employees just getting off work having a beer, laughing, carrying on, and telling jokes. They were all young men in their early twenties, and at first I thought to myself, “What the hell are you all so happy about? What is there to laugh and giggle about? I hate life.”

I continued in my misery giving them all an unnoticed dirty look. After observing about five minutes of their constant good humor, it dawned on me that half of them probably didn’t even have a father, or one that lived in the home when they were children. I know several kids in their twenties who have never even met their fathers. I thought that despite my dad’s shortcomings, he was there; he did love me very much, and I knew him like the back of my hand. Even though I never applauded my dad’s methods of parenting, he had taught me most of the important lessons in life.

Then I thought that I had my dad until I was 35 years old. Averaging out how many years I had him, I was doing better than most people in America. So I started to focus on how lucky I was to have a father at all, much less one who truly loved me. My whole attitude changed. I am going to miss him, but I am damn lucky to have ever had him at all.

There are so many great books and classes in positive thinking I don’t think I have to elaborate. I recommend Dale Carnegie’s public speaking class as well as all of his books.

Check your library and bookstore for others.

Excerpt from “Beauty Health and Happiness – A Way of Life” by Lily Morgan