Not that there’s a good time for such a thing to happen, but it was a really inconvenient time for me to break my arm.

It happened a month ago today on a gorgeous mid-April Friday, the first day of sunshine after a long spell of rain.  On the spur of the moment, my friend Kim and I decided to meet at the dog park when I finished work to let her exuberant young puppy, Bella, do some doggie socializing and go for a run.

Just as we neared the park’s entrance, Bella and I somehow collided and I went flying.  I grabbed the fence to try to break my fall.  But I landed hard, hearing a sharp crack and a stabbing pain in my right shoulder as I tumbled to the ground.

Before I knew it, I was in the hospital’s emergency room getting x-rays and intravenous pain blockers.  Two days later, a specialist was showing me the pictures of the mess I’d made of my upper arm and scheduling me for surgery.

Bad Timing

As I mentioned, it was not a good time for me to be taken out of action.  Kim, whose dog I tripped over, was scheduled for surgery herself in ten days and I had planned to be with her and to help her through her recovery.

In less than two weeks, the director of the clinic where I worked was retiring and I was helping plan the send-off party for her.  I had worked at her side for over eleven years and now I would miss her last days.

Meanwhile, a  therapist and two interns were leaving the clinic and a new doctor was coming aboard.  Plus the Easter holiday would complicate the payroll processing, and all of those things were part of my job.

And lastly, I would miss an out-of-state family memorial service and reunion I had so wanted to attend.

Positivity Means It’s OK to Feel Sorry

If you or anyone close to you has ever had shoulder surgery, you know the recovery is a long and very painful one.  The therapy sessions and daily exercise regime are torture.

All in all, I had every reason to be upset.  And yet, I’ve found myself flowing through it all with a preponderance of acceptance, interest, patience, and curiosity.  To tell you the truth, I surprised myself a little with the naturalness of my own positivity.  It’s one thing, after all, to accept a theory.  It’s something else to experience its truths in the actual day-to-day living out of your life.

I’m not saying that I didn’t feel any regret or disappointment over my circumstances.  Of course I did.  And there have been moments, too, when the relentless discomfort and the weariness of enduring it had me feeling my share of self-pity and anger over my enforced limitations.

Positivity doesn’t mean you don’t ever feel the negative stuff.  On the contrary.  It means you feel fully whatever emotion is there, accepting the reality of its presence, honoring it as a valid part of your experience.

What I am saying is that, on the whole, I felt positive a whole lot more than I felt negative.  I noticed my optimism and my inclination to problem solve and my willingness to congratulate myself when I managed a challenging task with my non-dominant hand.  I noticed my genuine gratitude and appreciation for the helpfulness of friends and for their caring, and for the skill of the medical personnel who patched me back together and worked with me to make me whole again.

Opening to the Gifts

I noticed how I opened myself to the gifts my solitude brought me and to the exquisite beauty of springtime unfolding outside my windows.

One of the gifts it brought was a realization that I had actually internalized the truth that  genuine happiness isn’t dependent on external circumstances.  It’s more like an endlessly streaming fount of well-being, a breathing of the very essence of the life-force, rising from our center, and present within us all.

All that keeps us from recognizing it is the layers of beliefs that cloak it.  Peel them away, and it runs fresh and clear, like a stream hidden by tall, wild grasses.  It’s the state that positive psychologists call “authentic happiness,” a state of being where we’re grounded in and constantly fed by our true, central selves.

To find that state, to part all the grasses of misplaced beliefs that hide it from us is, really, the goal of all self-development and self-actualization work.  To seek it is one of our inalienable rights as human beings.

In the end, I believe that it’s a spiritual quest, a drive to discover and live within the embrace of the divine at the core of our being.

On a more mundane level, the positivity of authentic happiness is supportive and nurturing of all that makes life worthwhile.  It provides us with strength, with optimism and hope, with the richness of appreciation and gratitude, with the glow of pleasure and the sparkle of joy.  It fills us with the drive to discover and express our unique sets of talents, strengths, values and skills.  It opens our perception to possibilities and infuses us with the curiosity, vitality and confidence to pursue them.

This little break in my normal, busy routine let me see how much positivity means to me, and how much it means to me to share with you the tools I find for making it the driving force in our lives.  Watch for some changes here.  I expect to be turning up the fire under this blog.  I have joy to share, after all, and we need all of that we can get.