What good is a positive attitude, anyway?

When I was deep in the throes of depression wrought from joblessness, nobody could say anything that made me feel better. In fact, I resented it. It was especially galling when some lucky gainfully employed person would say something like, "Don't worry about it Chuck. You're a smart guy. You'll find something soon."

Yeah, well, I had been looking for many moons and nothing had presented itself. Those types of words rang hollow, and not in the good way that a drum rings hollow.

Thusly did I spiral downward. The worse things got, the worse I felt and the worse things got. When my wife bailed on me, I figured it could not get any worse. One morning when I was seriously considering frying myself on the third rail of the Long Island Railroad track, it hit me: Things could only get better.

In a very strange coincidence, the Internet spit over a hundred bucks at me that very day. (I've yet to have another day remotely like that. It was a glaring sign saying, "Yes, things can only get better!") For a brief moment, I thought all my troubles were over, that I could travel the world blogging and getting $100 a day for it.

Well, it's actually a good thing that didn't happen. It would have made me lazy and would have cost me my marriage because I wouldn't have been around to nurture it.

(By the way, in case anyone's interested -- wifey and I are doing well in our now reconciled state. If your marriage is in trouble, I highly recommend you put some energy into fixing it rather than give up. It's like... we just feel so lucky because we came so close to throwing it away for total bullshit -- hers and mine. Anyway...)

That one lucky day totally transformed my attitude. It was a pivot point after which I realized that my life wasn't pointless, that things would be OK. After that day, it became much easier to get out there and make things happen so that I could survive.

And that's exactly what I did. I'm still struggling, but I am so grateful to have the skills and work ethic to bring in some money, the cleverness to grow a business, the long-term outlook to engender the patience to just keep putting one foot in front of the other on this long journey, the serenity to enjoy the scenery along the way. All of this fills me with gratitude and hope. More than that, it makes the present moment so much more enjoyable; it makes it so much easier to do the things that need to be done, even when I don't really want to do them.

So I guess as the Internet's Numero Uno Unemployment Guru™, my advice for today is to be grateful for what you have, to see that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it's (probably) not a train.

Then do some stuff. Life's short. Participate.