5/24/16

Today's Horoscope

All signs:

Today you will have a choice. It is the same choice you have everyday. Every moment of your life in fact. You have to decide how you face the world. You have to figure out if you are going to work for yourself or against yourself.

That seems kind of stupid, doesn't it? Who would consciously work against themselves?

Yet when faced with any challenge, when we're not even faced with anything, for that matter, we often choose the darkness. We tend to fixate on what can go wrong rather than what can go right. We worry about things that never come to pass. We obsess over negative outcomes and find bogeymen and demons in the shadows instead of hope and prosperity in the light.

Simply, you can choose to live your life in a positive or negative manner. Your outlook is one of the biggest factors influencing how happy and fulfilling your life is. It sounds trite, and new agey, and like some silly self help fad, but it's not. That's just that negativity again.

It's our old friend fear at work. There are a million reasons why we choose negative instead of positive, but it's all really the same reason. Many of us are simply afraid to think that things will work out right. We think we are tempting fate and that we will jinx ourselves if we say or even think that everything is going well.

There are an infinite number of pithy axioms and sayings that warn against it. “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” We are all familiar with Murphy’s law, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. We hear things like this all our life, and it puts the idea in our heads that there is some supernatural force out to get us. There's not. Look at the stars. They need want to guide us, yet the only influence they have is to tell you things you already know in rambling posts on social media.

So many of us go through life trying not to tempt fate, knocking on wood and turning to superstitions to ward off bad fortune. When we see only the bad possibilities, we only arrive at the bad outcomes.

That's not even true. The fact that you are still alive, and despite the fact that you like to bitch and moan about it, you are probably living a much better life than the majority of people on this planet. If life was so fraught with danger, if life was nothing but negative outcomes, how the hell have you made it this far?

The worst that could happen almost never happens. So why do we live in constant fear of it? Why do we assume that the sky will fall every time we have a chance to walk in the sun? Logically, there is no reason for it whatsoever.

So we go on everyday, holding ourselves back, telling ourselves that it's pointless to try, finding any far fetched scenario to keep us from doing what we really want to do. The odds are nearly always in our favor. Yes, there are sometimes people that want to knock us down, but there will always be more people that want to help us up and see us succeed. Who you decide to let influence your life is also a choice.

You will find that you can accomplish so much more in life if you simply expect to. Most of the time things are going to work out a certain way anyway, so you can go through the experience with hope and optimism or you can wallow in misery and self doubt. You can get the most out of it and learn and find opportunity, or you can clench your muscles and squeeze your eyes shut and wait for it to be over, and find yourself in the same place you were when you began.

It is all a choice, and you can be afraid and try in vain to somehow exert control over the uncontrollable, or you can steer into the skid and find the joy and exhilaration you are expecting to be there. It may seem odd or even scary at first, but once you start choosing positivity it will become less of a conscious choice and more of an instinct. You most likely choose the negative path subconsciously now, why not turn that around?

View a setback as an opportunity. See a failure for what it is, a normal part of the learning experience that helps us grow. Imagine a happy outcome to whatever you're facing, and try to get as close as you can to that destination. Assume you are going to get a yes rather than a no to your request. You will find that if you expect it, you will influence the people around you to expect it too. Expect to get what you want and people will be more inclined to give it to you.

The stars understand positive versus negative. They know that when the universe began there were equal parts matter and antimatter. Not exactly equal, though. If it were equal, everything would have canceled each other out and there would be no universe left. There was a tiny fraction more matter though, and at moment of the big bang there was so many particles in existence that the miniscule extra bit of matter left over was enough to create everything we see today. We were so close to winking out of existence seconds after we began, and the only thing that saved us was a tiny needle tick over to the positive side.

You can be that deciding factor in your own life.

The world is limitless, yet we limit ourselves. We hold ourselves back every day, stymied by our own self preservation instinct gone wild. Overcome it. Override it. Use the greatest gift we possess, freewill. Change your outlook and you could change your world.

Don't be afraid to dream big. Don't be afraid to expect things to work out.

Don't live in fear of your happiness being taken away all the time, or you might find that there isn't much happiness left to lose.