“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude”. - Maya Angelou
A young bride from the East during wartime followed her husband to a U.S Army camp on the edge of the desert in California. Living conditions were primitive at best, and her husband had advised against her move, but she wanted to be with her newly wedded husband. The only housing they could find was a run-down shack near an Indian village.
The heat was unbearable in the daytime - 115˚ in the shade. The wind blew constantly, spreading dust and sand all over everything. The days were long and boring. Her only neighbours were Indians, none of whom spoke English. When her husband was ordered farther into the desert for two weeks of maneuvers, loneliness and the wretched living conditions got the best of her. She wrote to her mother that she was coming home. She couldn’t take it anymore.
In a short time she received a reply which included these two lines, “Two men looked through prison bars; one saw mud, the other saw stars”. She read the lines over and over again and began to feel ashamed of herself. She didn’t really want to leave her new husband. All right, she thought, she is going to look for the stars. In the following days she set out to make friends with the Indians, asking them to teach her weaving and pottery. At first they were distant, but as soon as they sensed her genuine interest, they returned her friendship. She became friendly with their culture and history – in fact, everything about them. She began to study the desert, it too changed from a desolate, forbidding place to a marvelous thing if beauty.
She had her mother send her books. She studied the forms of cacti, the yuccas and the Joshua trees. She collected sea shells that had been left there when the sands had been an ocean floor. Later, she became such an expert on the area that she wrote a book
about it.
Wayne Dyer said “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”. We are individually responsible for our view of life. Whenever you are in a difficult situation ask yourself this question “What is the positive side of this thing, what is the good in this situation or what is the possibility that this thing will work out?” Our minds is our garden, our thoughts are the seed, so we can choose to plant flowers or weeds but remember the Bible says “Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap” (Galatians 6:7).
What had changed? Not the desert; not the Indians. Simply by changing her mind-set she had transformed a miserable experience into a highly rewarding one. She had turned a dusty and hot desert into a precious one.
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