I realized recently that most of my life is seen as black and white; good and bad. There is no grey…or better yet there is no color at all. The words I heard the most growing up were “never” and “should”.

“You should have said this…”

“You should have done that…”

“You never take out the trash.”

“You never make your bed.”
That means what I said was wrong. What I did was wrong. It negates every time I took out the trash or made my bed.

These are words that made me see my life as good and bad (I was bad, everyone else was good). These are words I don’t want to use anymore. My brain is naturally trained to think this way, but I’m working to reprogram it to think in terms of grey; in terms of a rainbow. I have been working on this for a while, and seeing some progress. Maybe not as much as I would like, but I’ll get there someday… little by little, right?

I might not automatically think in this positive, peace-love-rainbow way, but I when I catch myself thinking in that right-wrong, black-white way I try to redirect my thinking. For example, this weekend I was training for the triathlon I’m doing in a few months. I finished a 20 mile bike ride and then went for a run right away, to get my body used to running right after biking. So I was running, actually more like jogging…a very slow jog (I bet an old lady walking could have passed me)…anyway, I was jogging and I was in pain. Bad pain, like what-am-I-doing-running-at-11-am-in-the-Arizona-summer-sun-I-don’t
-think-I-will-ever-be-able-to-finish-the-triathlon-I-WANT-TO-DIE kind of pain.
But I kept thinking I have to run two miles at least, I would be a failure if I didn’t. Luckily I caught myself. Thinking that way would make all the work I did as “not good enough”. And I’m sick of viewing myself as “not good enough”. Instead, I decided it didn’t matter the distance, it was the effort that counted.

I ended up running about a mile and a half and I’m not upset about it. Instead, because I’m learning to live life in the peace-love-rainbow way, I’m proud of myself.