working on it... future fridays

It has been a struggle these last few months, and I cannot quite pinpoint it, except that the world really gets me down sometimes.
This week it was yet another shooting after the 2 from last week (not just schools, but also bars, yoga studios, and synagogues now), reports on the humanitarian crises in Syria and Yemen, wildfires, an embarrassment of a president and the GOP (yesterday it was a press conference and a fierce reporter's expulsion, tomorrow it will be more immigration policy), tepid elections (except for the year of the woman!), my card-carrying membership in the student loan crisis and the American health insurance absurdity, reading up on my taxes for next year, living in a tropical rainforest with this fall's amount of rain minus the tropical part, waking up between 4am and 5am quite regularly now, spinning my wheels in some hefty mud at work, not separating work from life very well... The list goes on.

I have never been the cheeriest of people, and I find that I am looking for the tiniest moments of sunlight especially now:
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'"  (Kurt Vonnegut)



And yet, I am curious about this side of difficulty.


According to some psychologists, there is an upside of the dark side:
"While mindfulness, kindness, and positivity can take us far, they cannot take us all the way. Sometimes, they can even hold us back. Emotions such as anger, anxiety, guilt, and sadness might feel uncomfortable, but it turns out that they are also incredibly useful. For instance:

Anger fuels creativity
Guilt sparks improvement
Self-doubt enhances performance

In the same vein, we can become wiser and more effective when we harness the darker parts of our personality in certain situations. For instance:

Selfishness increases courage
Mindlessness leads to better decisions

The key lies in what the authors call “emotional, social, and mental agility,” the ability to access our full range of emotions and behavior—not just the “good” ones—in order to respond most effectively to whatever situation we might encounter."

{photo credit unknown}