Always turning things around.

I’m thinking that life is largely mind over matter. One has to learn to be optimistic. To expect success. In virtually every endeavor. Sure, there’ll be failures along the way. But the optimist thinks of those failures as learning experiences. And if I fail time and time again – well, that’s the way to fill one’s life with learning experiences. Sometimes, it takes an awful long time to learn. Heck, I need multiple lifetimes to learn even a small percentage of everything that I need to know. Just to survive. Amazing that I have survived this long. Some 75 years. Never thought I’d do it. Even though I’m basically an optimist. I’m surrounded by people who think that if something can go wrong, it’ll go wrong. So sure enough, it goes wrong. On a daily basis. Yes, they set themselves up for failure. Automatic failure. I refuse to do that. I sort of failed yesterday and the day before that. And come to think of it, I’ve sort of failed every day of my life. Every night, too. But please note, I say ‘sort of failed.’ It’s never been total failure. That’s my saving grace. I have never conceded that failure really is failure. Because I’m always in the process of turning things around. –Jim Broede