What robs you of appreciation, adventure, and the thrill of doing the possible? Pessimism, that’s what. It means you miss life’s joyful moments.

After all, the cow jumped over the moon.

You aren’t as big and bulky as a cow. If a cow can jump, so can you. You’ve been jumping all your life. (Unless you were worrying about how jumping might cause you to fall on your face.) Sometimes you just need to trust that everything will work together for good.

And while you are doing your jumping jacks through life, stop focusing on the negative things that could be looming in the future. Trust yourself. See how you can break your record, not your bones. And if you do fall? (We all fall occasionally.) If you don’t quite make it the way you wanted? Just get up. Start all over again. Fall down; get up.

What did you learn about getting up? Cherish that lesson. Not the one about if I hadn’t been jumping I never would have fallen.)

I’m not advocating that we all become what some call a Pollyanna, like the heroine in the story that ALWAYS finds ONLY good in everything. I’m going to stop short of recommending irrepressible optimism.

There are plenty of things I find hard to accept. Most of them have something to do with bad things happening to good people. Bad things do happen to people who don’t deserve it. But I don’t play, “What if?” Good people die young. People get cancer. Fuck cancer.

None of this means our outlook must include the expectation that bad things are going to happen. No. No. No. I’m sure someone, somewhere, has done a study on how thinking and visualizing what good can come invites more of just that: Good!

I am remembering what I read about how Olympic athletes are trained to see themselves doing it right. It seems to work for a lot of them. Think about that.