Smiling Through this Stupid Cold - ramblings of a very foggy mind

My grandmother said to me the other day that you have to smile every morning. You have to get up and smile. Since this comes from the only 90+ woman I know who still lives on her own and has perfect skin, I think it's worth listening. Now, she also never eats anything green, and believes everything she sees on the super-alarmist Spanish language news, but still. Worth listening. And it immediately made me think of Carole King's Beautiful, which has been a bit of an anthem for me for some time.

You've got to get up every morning with a smile on your face
And show the world all the love in your heart
Then people gonna treat you better
You're gonna find, yes, you will
That you're beautiful as you feel

Now, believe you me, I know that it's not easy to wake up with a smile, when your life is what it is. I know what it's like to wake up when there's nothing to wake up for. What it's like to wake up when your body refuses to cooperate. What it's like to wake up when you feel like sleep just never even happened. What it's like to wake up and want to go back to sleep, curl up under those covers and just stay there, and escape back into dreamland.

The thing is, no matter what, our thoughts and attitude are the single thing we have the most control over in this world. That's it. There's nothing else. Not our bodies, not our emotions, not our physical environment, not our status, and certainly not other people. Just our thoughts and attitude - and thoughts to a lesser extent.

Now, there have been studies, and books and spiritual teachings, and all kinds of things on how attitude affects the rest of our lives - our bodies, our work, our learning, our mood, and our success. All of it. I am not going to go into these, but if you want more info, please let me know. What I want to say today is that even if it's not easy, it's the most important thing we can do. Smile.

Even if you don't feel it, you can fake it til you make it a lot of the time. Don't use it to mask other emotions, because that's toxic, but use it to change how you feel. Smile. It really is true that how you see yourself affects how the rest of the world treats you. It changes everything.

I woke up feeling so heavy in my body and so light in my head this morning, that I seriously did not want to move. Did not want to lift my head off my pillow. Right now, as I write, two hours later, I'm still having trouble holding my head up. It keeps wavering and dipping off to the side. I started sneezing, and I know what it is - I have a cold. Oh joy, get ready for another setback. The thing is, the cold isn't adding to the fatigue so much as the brain fog, and the sensitization of my nervous system. It feels weird, and not at all pleasurable. Plus it's making it very hard for me to figure out what to do with myself - I don't know if I should try to do physical things like laundry and dishes - I know mental activity is pretty much out - or if I should just curl up and watch TV all day.

So... choices, as I dimly sense them:
a) Be miserable, rant, rave, cry, scream, and blame it all on my stupid body not working right.
b) Go back to bed and sleep, and wreck my sleep pattern, risking a bigger relapse, all the while getting mad at myself for making things worse.
c) Push through it, again, risking a bigger relapse and self-blame.
d) Breathe, accept, take an advil and vent on my blog and drink lots of tea before calling my Mommy to coddle me and help me figure out what to do.

Yeah, I think I like the last option best. I'll go with that one. So now I can smile, and show the world all the love in my heart. People will treat me well, because they tend to do so, because I do so. And I find, that despite all the crap in my life, I am still beautiful as I feel - no, scrap that - more beautiful than I feel, because I ain't feeling so good :)

I wanted to write more about the song, because I do love it so much, but I find my brain is not cooperating, so perhaps another day. I'm just going to publish this now, and hope that somehow it actually makes sense...