CHOOSE

 Back from Venice with hundreds of photographs to turn into a scrapbook, but the first thing I turned to was my journal...  This page began when I found this pencil sketch online, and it seems to me to illustrate the half full/half empty thing.  The background and the sun are done with Caran d'Ache crayons, and the grey bottle is pasted onto the page.

This is a bit of a soapbox of mine, so forgive me if I've bored you with this before, but I find that I can (and indeed MUST) make this choice daily, if not hourly!  It would be so easy to get dragged down by my illness, and to have a relentlessly negative outlook on life ... and I do have someone in my extended family who is like that, and nobody wants to be near them.  A good lesson to try and see the positive and celebrate your blessings, rather than endlessly rehearsing your woes and complaints!

But there are days when my inner Pollyanna goes on strike, and I WANT to feel sorry for myself, in fact I feel positively entitled.  But its not just me, there are countless people who could with perfect justification complain about the hand life has dealt them, and the poor quality of their life, but if they do .... they make themselves extremely unpopular.  Its not that a positive attitude changes anything, because it doesn't - the facts remain the same, but what can and does change is how you view it, and therefore deal with it.

So even when its difficult to do so I try to remember to count my blessings, and celebrate all that is good in my life, rather than focusing on the negatives.  It really works - and journalling helps! That alone makes me feel lucky!

ALL THINGS PASS ....

This page began when I read an online thread about dribbling with ink - which made me want to have a go, and as you can see that's what I did.  Sadly I am rather put off doing it again by the fact that I then upended half a bottle of ink all over the desk.  This rather put me off ink and I haven't used any since ... well I haven't got that much left!

Anyway, this is a Distress Ink background with the black ink dribbled onto it.  The next part was the big writing in the middle - which tells you everything you need to know about my frame of mind at the time.  I was (am) struggling with something I can't change, so needed to do some work on shifting my mental attitude - and isn't art journalling just fantastic for that?  I've worked so many things out this way .....

The "spatters" are actually a stamp, as is the picture and the number at the top.  After I'd done all the writing above, it was just down to doodling and drawing (my favourite part) until I felt the page was "finished".

Orange feels to me like a strong, positive colour - just right for the message I was trying to give myself.  It did work, and this is one of those pages I go back to sometimes to remind myself to look at life from the half-full rather than half-empty perspective.  The other thing that helps lift my mood when I get a bit down is smiling - yes really!  I heard that it triggers good hormones, something to do with the autonomic nervous system?  Anyway, it also works and I recommend it .... but not when anyone is looking or they will wonder what you've been up to!!