Musings

As much as I would like to be a glass half full kind of person, I seem to always end up on the half empty side. I sometimes am this way with others, and am certainly this way with myself. I like to tell myself that I'm not being negative...that I'm just being "real" and "telling it like it is."  I think there are times when this is certainly true and believe we all need to hear "truth" at various moments in our lives. I also tend to be annoyed with those who seem to be positive and happy all the time. I mean, c'mon... haven't they ever had a bad day? In any case, the words below are my encouragement to be more positive.  I will try to catch myself being negative, and if I fail, if the thoughts make it all the way through my mind, then I will read the tips below to knock them right out of my head.  If, like me, you struggle to keep your glass half full, then I hope these words will also help you! Excerpt below taken from the Au...

My pink shoes... were what I would now call "slip-ons" ---flat soles, no laces or buckles, a bit like ballet shoes.  The front of each one was ornamented with an artificial flower, a darker pink than the body of the shoe.  When I was six, those shoes expressed more about the world in which I wanted to live than anything I could possibly have put into words.  In a strange way, those pink shoes and my appetite for the places I might go in them led me, after many twists and turns, to a cell in Evin Prison. - p. 13 The depth of our grieving has to do with the importance of love in our culture.  This may sound very strange to Westerners who have been encouraged to adopt a cartoon-version of Iranians---suicide bombers, warmongers, religious zealots.  But love is the more important thing to grasp when you study Iranians. - p. 29 Iranians fall in love in exactly the same was as everyone else in the world. Muslims fall in love in the same way as everyone e...