It has been a really negative year for everyone, you can't even turn on the news without seeing more negativity.

Fighting and name calling are becoming par for the course. Our own government is acting more like a class of preschoolers than a leadership body made up of mature adults. Not just one party, but both are playing the "I don't like you so you can't come to my birthday party" game.

I used to joke that maturity was overrated, but a little bit of maturity wouldn't hurt any of us right now. If you have a truth to speak, then by all means speak it but the minute we resort to including personal attacks and name calling we can no longer consider ourselves responsible adults.

One of my favorite parenting experts is a woman named Susan Stiffelman, she calls her parenting approach Passionate Parenting

Through her program I have learned many things, but most of all she has taught me the futility of power struggles. The more you seek to control another person, the more they resist that control, and the faster you lose the control you seek.

Perhaps she should expand her book to explain that that applies to every situation, not just our own children. We can all share our views as loudly and even as aggressively as possible, but if it is important enough to share then it should be our goal to try to get other people to hear and hopefully understand us?

When we shut them out before they even get a chance to hear it, what is the point of saying it at all?

It has been a year since I made the commitment to remain positive no matter what the situation. I picked a bad year to do it, and as hard as I have tried I still have a very long way to go.

Along the way I have had to cut out a lot of activities, going to my much loved locals only site is just one of those things. Not because anyone there has been unkind to me or attacked me in any way, but because the negativity is not only a physical but an emotional drain.

Those who teach positive living say that it takes five positives to counteract a single negative. If so then the cloud of negativity hanging over this country is going to take centuries to conquer.

Those same experts also teach that we should not focus on what we don't have, but what we do have. Instead of focusing on what is going wrong, we are supposed to focus on what is right.

I'm not saying that it is a bad thing to speak your mind or to disagree with what is going on in the government right now. I'm just saying before you complain, see if you can find a way to turn that complaint into positive action.

One thing I have always stressed to my children is that bitching has never solved a single problem. Instead of focusing on the problem, focus first on the lessons we can learn from it and then focus on finding the solution.

My children understand this concept, but so few adults seem to these days. Even my children know that smart people use their brains, the rest resort to calling names.

What are we teaching our children right now?

That is is better to hate than to love?
That it is better to complain that to take action?
That it is okay to call other people names as long as you don't like them?
That anyone who does not agree with you is the enemy?

Children do learn these lessons whether we mean to teach them or not, and it might seem okay to teach them to attack that which they do not like but... there will be times in every child's life when they do not like us.

When those lessons come back to us, they sometimes hurt.

One area of our life affects every other. If we insist we are teaching our children respect but can't offer respect to our neighbor or even our president, then we aren't teaching them respect at all.

We are teaching them to hate, and we really have no right to be surprised when that hate comes back home. Teach them love, and compassion, teach them to speak their truth respectfully, teach them to create not to destroy.

Misery can very easily become a way of life, and some people are quite happy living there. It is quite possible for someone to be happy only when they are miserable, I wouldn't believe it either if I hadn't seen it myself so many times.

Is happiness that much more difficult than misery?

Most people who wallow in misery would be very surprised to learn that happiness lies in the very same source in which they find their misery.

Either way, what you look for is what you get, there will never be a shortage of things to be unhappy about, there are an infinite number of things we could complain about within any given day.

There are just as many positive things in that same day... it just depends on where you were looking at the time.

Be careful because all of that positive in your life can easily slip by you... unnoticed happiness quite often looks very much like misery.

You do not have to cry over spilled milk, in fact you can just as easily CHOOSE to laugh about it!

Can you see the keyword in that sentence? Look very, very carefully.

It's all about choice baby.

Right now, this very moment, you are being given the chance to make the very same choice that changed my life, a decision I have recommitted to nearly every day since.

The choice to seek out the positive no matter what the circumstances, no matter how bleak or frightened, or horrible you may feel. No matter what comes your way, seek the positive at all costs. It is there, it may be hidden, it may even be in disguise but it is there.

Stand on it, insist on it, allow nothing to get in your way and happiness will find you... you just have to look in the right place!

Thank you for another wonderful week in which to find the beauty that life holds, and thank you for reading.

P.S. I finally added a subscription option for those who would like to follow the Sugar Patch a little more closely. You can sign up at the top of the right-hand menu.

Being positive does not mean you are unaware of the dark side of life, and it does not mean you are ignoring it. It doesn’t mean you are 100% satisfied with your life as it is. It does not mean you deny that changes need to be made. It does not mean a lot of things I thought it did.

When you surround yourself with negative, negative becomes all you see. When you surround yourself with positive you begin to see the positive all around you. What you feed grows, what you starve dies. Making the decision to be positive means not allowing yourself to dwell on the negative.

There are challenges in every life, and there will be times when it seems that all of the positive in the world will not counteract the negative people or situations in your life. We live in a negative world, the news, celebrity gossip, reality television. We do not have the most positive role models to work with.

You don’t have to have a perfect life, it isn’t that bad things never happen to you or people you care about. Many positive people put off the illusion that their lives have been perfect, not because they have been, they have just chosen to place their focus elsewhere.

One of the biggest difficulties I had in making the change for the positive in my life was the overwhelming abundance of negative that hits my life from time to time. I share my life with some very, very negative people and I felt like I was getting pulled into it constantly like a magnet.

How was I supposed to ignore my health problems, pretend I had no troubles, not end up emotionally involved in the negative things going on in the lives of friends and family? Was I supposed to stop caring about myself and others? What would happen if I didn’t worry about these things?

To be honest, the world didn’t come to an end when I stopped worrying. I was still able to offer my support without becoming enmeshed in other peoples problems, and my own problems seemed far less significant. I had more time to take care of my problems, and a greater ability to sort what did matter from what didn’t.

Worrying and negative thinking are habits, and if you are like most people, it has been a life long habit. You have had a lot of practice finding the negative in your life. When you focus on something it becomes bigger, and the bigger something is the more intimidating it seems.

Positive thinking is a habit as well. At first it is a struggle to seek the positive in every person in your life. Sometimes it requires a great deal of creativity. One particularly negative person found their positive role in my life by serving as my motivation for many new avenues I had always wanted to explore but never had.

Negative influences in your life can serve as motivation in many regards, maybe you just want to show them who you really are. Maybe you want to break free of their influence. Maybe they motivate you to take college courses or dance classes.

The key to changing your own negative thoughts into positive thoughts is to keep switching the focus in your head. If you keep telling yourself to stop thinking negative thoughts you are only reinforcing them. Instead of trying to stop them, learn to transform them. Strive to find that good thing in the midst of the bad.

The problem with negative people is they are never really satisfied until they bring you down to their level. If you wrestle with a pig you will both get dirty, but the pig will like it. Don’t allow yourself to be pulled down to that level.

Surround yourself with positive influences and your mind will follow. Find your own inner peace and hold on to it. It is there, I promise.