It is easy to talk about how attitude affects our life – it is honestly pretty logical. The way you approach any given situation is going to have a big impact on how it plays out. As different energies interact with each other, it starts to become obvious that when it comes to energy, like attracts like. If your attitude is positive, you will naturally draw more positivity towards you. If your attitude is negative, then you will draw more negativity.

For this reason, one of the most important qualities for us to cultivate is gratitude. Any time something presents in our lives, be it a ‘positive’ thing or a ‘negative’ thing, the initial reaction can be the same – a sense of gratitude for the opportunity that has been presented to us to learn something new. The reality is that there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’; there are only choices, and consequences from those choices. Seen from this perspective everything in our lives simply becomes one or the other, a choice or a consequence, an opportunity to evolve and grow.

But we can start smaller than that. We can be grateful that we have a roof over our heads, food on the table, a car in the garage. We live in a time where, compared to past moments, we want for little when it comes to necessities, especially in the West. We don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn to hunt our own food and gather firewood lest we starve or freeze. That we have the time to spend on this type of contemplation of self is in and of itself something we can be grateful for.

All of this comes back to attitude. If we believe our lives are hard, then they will be so. If we approach the world with an attitude of gratitude for what we have rather than a focus on what we do not have (something all too common in the modern world), then our whole perspective shifts. This is not to say that we should not aspire to be more, or even to have more – there is nothing inherently wrong with the attainment of nice things. But recognising the value of whatever it is that we have now is the path to a much more content life.

“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.” – Willie Nelson