By Jim Livingston

In 2013, I became homeless through no fault of my own. It is a story worthy of a novel, but I went from being very comfortable in a job to losing most of my possessions and living out of my jeep overnight. I had an income but no place to stay. So I choose to drive around the United States to try and find myself. The events that led to my losing my job and home were traumatic and left me filled with questions about life.

Thanksgiving some very kind friends offered me a few days on their couch and to spend the holidays with them. Their family came from all over the United States. I knew most of them for many years, so it was a treat to catch up. Yet I was struggling. Most of my possessions were gone. My own son was in the Army and unable to meet up with me. I felt the loss of my parents in a way that I had no since both had died. I was overwhelmed with the sense of all the things missing in my life from just a few months prior. It didn’t feel like thanksgiving for anything. I was deeply grieving my folk’s death, my son’s absence, and the loss of my things. I didn’t feel very thankful.

I sat in a pity party and for some reason, I remembered a lesson a psychology professor once taught. I paraphrase but he explained that he felt we humans were conditioned to focused on the negative, but that to be truly happy we had to train ourselves to break the natural condition and look at the positive. After all, for 1000’s of years it was far more important to be aware of the lion tiger and bear than the amazing sunset. Those negative things could kill us while the positives like good tasting food or beautiful weather merely made us more comfortable. But few of us in modern times must worry about lions or tigers or bears. We have clean water and clothes. But the old natural human will focus on the negative. So the bills and the fight with your spouse become just as stressful as if you were dealing with an encroaching lion. The trick he taught was, was to remember, that bill, even if you couldn’t pay it was not going to eat you. That the stress you might feel was not nearly as bad as it seemed

I wanted to focus on all the things I had lost including loved ones. But the adage, count your blessings, kept coming to mind. I had traveled to some of the most beautiful places. True, I slept in my car but I had seen things that were bucket list items and photographed them. I had time to play with my camera and was seeing leaps and bounds in my skill as a photographer daily. I was proud of the photos I was taking. I even entered a few in contests and won.

The generosity of my friends staggered me. One had even bought me two tires on top of putting me up for the holidays and inviting for the festivities. The more I looked for the wonderful in my life, the more I found it. It dawned on me that life truly is like photography, it is about what you focus on. At any given moment there are good things and bad things in all our lives. Some of the bad we can’t change. I once read that the truest form of spirituality was gratitude. Living each moment understanding that it is a gift. Good or bad is merely what we focus on. Today I choose to be thankful for all of it, good and bad, I am alive.