Back Home - July 26, 2010

No adventures in Panama City.

I planned on traveling to Panama City for another couple of days at the beach, but I decided to return to Dalton for several reasons, including my father's 77th birthday and a bad sunburn on my back.

All summer, I've had such adventures and such high expectations that good things were waiting around each corner. Now it's time to get back to reality, or is it?

One of my friends in Turkey, Umit, believes that we create our own realities. She says if we think positively and act positively, then we tend to draw positive people and positive experiences into our lives. If we think negatively and act negatively, then we attract negativity into our lives. Birds of a feather....

My location is now different, but my mindset doesn't have to change. In Turkey, I expected wonderful things to happen, and they did. I began to believe anything was possible, and I realized that my dreams were too small and needed to be replaced with much larger ones.

I don't want my new viewpoint to disappear. According to Oliver Wendell Holmes, it won't. "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."

From now on, my goal is to try to get beyond just minimal expectations of life and, instead, shoot for the stars. Turkey and Florida are over, but the adventures don't have to be, as long as I maintain my Turkish outlook.

I believe all of us can lead happier, more fulfilling lives if we will begin to truly expect more from life and from the universe.

As Mahatma Gandhi put it, "A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes."