Shifting your focus

Write your hurts in the sand. Carve your blessings in stone. Jamie the Very Worst Missionary

I love the picture this brings to mind. Sand gets wiped clean and smoothed out by the water and stone is pretty much forever. So the idea here is to record your hurts, if you are going to do that, in sand where it can be wiped clean and smoothed out and "forgotten" and record your blessings in stone where they can stand as a reminder on the days when the hurts threaten to overwhelm. In our lives we will have both hurts and blessings and the people who choose to let the hurts be washed away are generally more joyful, fulfilled, and pleasant to be around! Those who choose to carve their hurts in stone, however, are miserable to be around and miserable themselves. Why would anyone choose misery as the description for their life? And it is a choice. Yes, crappy things happen but we have a choice. Will we write them in the sand so they can be washed away and smoothed out or will we hold on to them as justification for being crappy ourselves? Ugh.
How about you? Have you been writing your hurts in the sand or carving them in stone? Have you lost sight of your blessings? I encourage you to try practicing today's quote. Try writing your hurts in sand and carving your blessings in stone and see what changes because of the shift in focus. I think you will be amazed.

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Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

A dime a dozen

"It's said that in the year 1796, the first U.S. dimes were produced for circulation. Hence, it would make sense for this phrase to originate sometime after." Read more here . Today the phrase carries the meaning that something is cheap or without value if it can be lumped in with other similar or exactly-like things. It's more of an insult than anything.

Life according to van Gogh...sort of

There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing. Vincent van Gogh in a l etter to Theo van Gogh, April 1882 Life is a little bit like today's quote from van Gogh. Some of us live life focusing on the drawing - the details - and have very little color. Others of us go for the color and forsake, to a degree, the drawing - the details. Unlike painting, according to van Gogh, one is not wrong over the other but somewhere in between the two would be the best I would think. If you look at some of van Gogh's paintings I feel like you can see where he might have struggled between the "how to do it" and the " how not to do it" (as he admittedly loved color so much but knew he had to focus more on the drawing) and that seems to be reflected in his life as well. In the end he wasn't able to find the ...

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