's motd Thurs April 3, 2008

[Guest guest]

GET THE CLEANING OUT CREW AGAIN!

Thursday, 03 April 2008

And a happy day to you! In my messages last week, I talked about and we worked on cleaning out your closets and your fridges. Well, I hope you're still in a cleaning mood because we've got a little bit more cleaning to do. Yep, it's time to clean out your minds.Did you ever see a TV show on CBS called Cold Case? Each episode started off with someone in the basement looking through all of these boxes filled with files. There would be hundreds of these boxes all lined in a row.

Well, you know what? Your mind is kinda like that. Think of your mind as a room filled with boxes, each box filled with files. And there are lots of those boxes in your mind. Shall we go through a few of them?There's the Happy Box. So many good things are in there. Like your trips to the beach when you were younger, memories of your Sweet 16 party, the day you graduated college, the day you first fell in love or the birth of your first child. Like I said, there's so much happiness in that box! When you take that box out and go through the files of your life, the Happy Box makes you feel all warm and, well...happy!Now let's go through another box. Oh, oh...it's the box filled with the Disappointments in your life. You know, like memories of the good grades you didn't make in school, not getting the job you wanted or the relationship that didn't work out with the one you loved.

And there's another box. It's the box of Harsh Words. This box is filled with peoples voices telling you things you really didn't want or need to hear. You know, things like this: "You're stupid! You'll never amount to anything! Why can't you be more like your brothers and sisters? When are you going to start losing some weight? You're such an embarrassment to the family!"Then there's another box, the Box of Insecurity. And another one...the Death Box. Now when you go through the first box I talked about, Happiness, you feel joyful because those memories are great ones for you. But when you go through the other boxes, they make you sad. Going through your disappointments or thinking about all of those unkind things people have said about you in the past really puts a downer on the way you feel about yourself. They can make you feel insecure. Or thinking about the people you loved, who are no longer with you, can really make you feel very sad. Well, it's time to clean out those boxes of files, don't you think?

Some of those boxes should be discarded altogether. You don't need to keep thinking about all of the things in your life that didn't work out. I mean, how are those thoughts supposed to help your life work out for the better now? You can't keep thinking about the people who've said nasty things to you or about you. Why give them that kind of power over your life? Discard those files!And remember, as I've told you in the past, those loved ones you've lost are still in your heart and their memories belong in your Happy Box, not your sad ones.No, it's not easy to discard these files. Because they can pop up again, just like some of those annoying Spams that sometimes pop up on your computer.So put your white gloves on again, put the "delete" button in your mind to work, get into that basement and...start cleaning!Love,