An acre of attitudes

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JBloggs

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Innspiration for innkeepers...
[h3]An acre of attitudes [/h3] Anne Lamott relates an image from a friend in her great book on writing, Bird by Bird. My version:
Everyone is given an acre of attitudes at birth. It's yours to tend and garden and weed and live with. You can plant bitterness or good humor. Feel free to fertilize and tend the feelings and approaches that you want to spend time with. Unless you hurt someone, this acre is all yours.
Probably worth putting up a decent fence, so that only the attitudes that you choose will have a chance to put down seeds, but it's certainly a bad idea to put up a wall, because a walled garden is no good to anyone passing by. You get to decide what comes through your fence gate, right?
Watching out for invasive species—spending sufficient time on weeding and pruning and staking seem to be incredibly powerful tools for accomplishing the life you want. I refuse to accept that an attitude is an accident of birth or an unchangeable constant. That would be truly horrible to contemplate.
Happy Valentine's Day. Good luck with your garden.
 
Life is a series of self-fulling attitudes. ie This is going to be a horrible party - we will not have a good time. Or I KNOW this is going to be a lovely evening.
Children hear their parents talking about them and then either fulfill what the parent says or just to be uncooperative does the opposite. Sometimes the "I will show them!" is the perfect attitude. (As in my family - just tell us we cannot do something..... red cape in front of a bull (head)).
 
A red cape! I could put that to use round here.
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Life is a series of self-fulling attitudes. ie This is going to be a horrible party - we will not have a good time. Or I KNOW this is going to be a lovely evening.
Children hear their parents talking about them and then either fulfill what the parent says or just to be uncooperative does the opposite. Sometimes the "I will show them!" is the perfect attitude. (As in my family - just tell us we cannot do something..... red cape in front of a bull (head))..
Interestingly, I was always told I could be anything I wanted. It wasn't until about 5 years ago I realized that wasn't really true.
 
Life is a series of self-fulling attitudes. ie This is going to be a horrible party - we will not have a good time. Or I KNOW this is going to be a lovely evening.
Children hear their parents talking about them and then either fulfill what the parent says or just to be uncooperative does the opposite. Sometimes the "I will show them!" is the perfect attitude. (As in my family - just tell us we cannot do something..... red cape in front of a bull (head))..
Interestingly, I was always told I could be anything I wanted. It wasn't until about 5 years ago I realized that wasn't really true.
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Actually, I have straddled the picket fence on that most of my life. My parents were saying I could do anything I made up my mind to do while at the same time Mom was preaching you go where your man goes - if his work takes him to Timbuktu you go with a smile and you never say no because someone else will be saying yes. They could not decide which era I belonged in - and I had a hard time figuring it out as I had a career, raised 6 kids (doing all the stuff Mothers did in Mom's era) and being supportive of DH with his going to school, hobbies, and trying to make it as an artist before he went back to work. Fortunately, he got out of the way and said - go for it instead of being a husband who held you back to salve his own ego. He is so confidant in his who/what is that it was never a problem (as long as he was able to do his thing and never told he could not get another "toy", come to think of it, when he was told no toys he "forgot").
 
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