I wanted to bake the sour cream blueberry bundt cake I've made many times in the past, but couldn't find my Cakes cookbook. I had it for the Russian TV show, because I made the sunshine cupcakes from the book, the soufflés being nixed in favour of a distinctly American dessert, the cupcake. I found it, eventually, and went to flip through it in the living area.

Turns out, Tilly also lurves my Cakes cookbook.

I swear, that puppy is my kryptonite. I can't resist her any more than I can resist Chase.

So, the thing about negative thinking is that it can spiral out of control. It feeds on itself. Unlike a perpetual motion machine or anything physical in this world that actually has to confirm to the laws of physics, negative thinking grows bigger and more encompassing the more it is done. When you have a group of people that aren't fact checking, aren't reality confirming, aren't thinking around the problem but just emotionally hanging out in the morass of negative thinking, it is so so so terribly easy to stay in that line of thinking, and fuck-you hate the world.

Which is not to say happy-go-lucky-let's-ignore-reality-in-favor-of-thinking-everything-is-okay positive thinking is great. Indeed not as such thinking is actually detrimental to developing resiliency because it hides checking reality and planning ahead.

There's a balance in there somewhere, a mid-point between the two where one isn't positive-thinking delusional, and also not negative-thinking spiraling into the dark. And no, I'm not talking the depression dark, that's an entirely different kind of negative thinking from what I'm talking about here. That type of negative thinking needs help. The kind I'm talking about here is the assumption the world is a bad place, the lack of seeing the good things, and the tendency to dismiss the good and see only the bad (which is, quite frankly, how we've been trained for hundreds of thousands of years: to see the bad and dismiss the good).

Since I find the negative so easy (I've trained myself to assume the worst for many, many years), and since I'm going through a rough time right now, and since I have the burpee challenge, Jonathan suggested a new challenge:

Write a blog post a day for a year. How about writing a positive one. One that you can keep up.

So, there we go.

Gauntlet thrown down.

Here's reality (critical thinking is not negative thinking, nor is objectively stating the facts): even in my strongest blogging years, I didn't write every day. I tried to write every day, but didn't succeed. Considering I have never done n burpees on the nth day of the year either, I don't find that I didn't succeed before to be a reason not to accept a challenge now, I have a new goal: to write every day, trying to find something positive about each day.

This is going to be a tough one. With luck, it'll rewire my brain towards reality, and away from the default negative.

Chase has been ill for the last three days. He hasn't eaten since Saturday morning, had a fever Saturday night, and hasn't pooped on his walks since Saturday morning. I offered to take him to the vet today, since I watch him on Monday nights and noticed how he wasn't eating, wasn't pooping, and wasn't *shock* chasing the squirrels. The first vet appointment was at 10, which is also when I have a standing "prior engagement" so I cancelled my attendance and took the dog to the vet.

The vet doesn't know what's wrong with him, nothing obvious was wrong. He wasn't tender to the touch in the abdomen. Nothing was swollen. Nothing was red. He doesn't have a fever (anymore). He has no energy, unsurprising: I'm low-energy after not eating for 3 days, too. I sent him off for bloodwork and x-rays, and went back to working on the project I'm trying to finish by the weekend. After a bit, the vet called, told me I could pick him up, he was done with the x-rays, nothing obvious wrong, no blockages in his intestines (lots of gas, though). Of course. Such a beagle.

So, I went to pick him up from the vet, drop him off at the house, and immediately hustle off to the project I'm working on. I looked at my list of errands, my list of things I needed to do to be healthy, my list of things I had been leaving undone as I worked on this project. All of them had taken a back seat to the project I'm working on.

Just as with any job, any client work, I was deprioritizing my needs against the needs of the job. I was putting the work before my self.

I'm not the only one who does this. At the E4E conference this year, Jonathan and I were talking to Justin Searls about how when he was on a business trip, at the end of the business part, he felt compelled to rush back to work, even though he had travelled tens of thousands of miles and tens of hours to travel to where he was, always with that monkey on his back. He had to consciously choose to stay a few days, relax, and enjoy the new environment.

I know that monkey. I know that urge to do better, more, faster. I understand that deep seated belief that if I work harder and longer, that I'll be rewarded, even though I know, I KNOW, that monkey on my back is a delusion, that that belief in working hard and I'll be rewarded even though I'm not working on the right things or for the right people or at the right time is a lie, that my biggest regret in life is not going to be not working hard enough but rather not working so so much. I know these things and STILL I was heading straight to doing work for someone else.

I recalled the conversation with Justin and Jonathan as I started driving to the office. I recalled that I'm awful at taking care of myself sometimes. I recalled my health, and changed directions. I picked up my mail, hadn't done that in weeks. I picked up a prescription refill that needed refilling, hadn't done that in weeks. I picked up a healthy meal, instead of having the boxes of Girl Scout cookies I have stashed in various places, one in my bookbag. I spent an hour taking care of myself.

Yes, that monkey is still on my back. It whispers sweet nothings into my ears, my dreams. It has me subjugating my needs for someone else's profit.

I know this, and the more I remember it, the more I'm likely to stop rushing to work on the next thing. Time to start muzzling the little fucker.