"Thank you for making this day necessary."

That Yogi Berra reference in the title of this post came to me this morning. I was thinking about how the unbidden experience of C.R.P.S. made Jan. 09 '09 necessary. Sometimes, folks with C.R.P.S. struggle to do ordinary self-care. It's easy to get upset when that happens, and harder to admit those non-Stoic feelings before running off to knee-jerk downward comparison, like, "I could have hooks!"


Well, I realized that 1-09-09 has become my necessary occasion. I cope because I strive. I strive because I hate pain. But I couldn't motivate myself with pain hatred alone. For me, creative, forward-directed coping works better. Sonja Lyubomyrski (2007)wrote in The How of Happiness that study participants in her lab journaled about their "optimum future selves." So, without knowing that study when this all started, I actually got that future self created in my head . That's the future self that's on the course with you folks, eating close to nature, moving, training...getting better than yesterday.

Yup, you know the drill: "Just keep swimming!"

Sonja's link:
http://chass.ucr.edu/faculty_book/lyubomirsky/