When one looks at the scope of things, like your life span, amazing how short it is.

My mother used to comment on how fast time goes by. Being much younger then, I didn’t understand what she meant. Now I certainly can relate to her words.

Seems I just blinked and the years have sped by. My life seems to have come full circle. I started my life in West Virginia. After having made many detours, here I am back home again. Coming home again was a choice. The circumstances that brought me home were not good ones. Three terminally ill family members. In these wonderful hills of West Virginia, one can find peace, if they chose to.

Most of life is choices. Things like where one is going to live. If you move into a floodplain, like I did, and you have a flood, then it is by choice how you deal with the flood.

The Golden Age can be golden. It has so many good features. Granted, things in your own body kinda of get your attention more often, or at least seem to, but how you deal with them is a choice. Many of the things we blame on age, really have no age discrimination Things like cancer, MS, MD, accidents, on, and on. But we so often times blame it all on age. Then we whine about that. In my own family, some of these illness took place at a young age.

So we don’t look physically like we did years ago. I for one know those bikini days are gone. Those days with long, brown hair days are gone. And so are those shoes with three inch heels.

I look back on those days, and must admit, I did enjoy them. But I don’t regret they will not return. So what, I now wear a one piece bathing suit, I now have short white hair, and I wear flat shoes most of the time. Since there is no way of recovering those days, and I am not sure I would even if I could, I deal with this age with delight.

Many good things have replaced them. So I have no reason to whine about that either.

At this stage of my life, I have more choices than I ever did. I don’t have to clock in for work; I don’t have to like people who I find nothing in common with. I don’t have to be a part of any organization I don’t fully believe in and I don’t have to use fake smiles or hugs. I normally don’t have to have a routine. I can and do, spur of the moments things. And I do collect antique dust.

I appreciate the beginning of a new day, the wonders of Mother Nature. I chose to see the beauty in many things I took for granted.

I don’t whine about the great waste land of television; I just turn it off if I chose not to like the programming . But I do respect the rights of others to enjoy some of the programs I chose not to watch. My son once reminded me that is what the off button is for.

Getting in a rush is not one of my chosen things. I don’t care how long that stop light is, if the person in front of me wants to rush out of the store, I usually just say, you can get ahead of me in line.

Where are we all going in such a hurry? Most seem to be going home to do mundane things anyway.

I know so many members of the Whiner Family-a family I am not a part of, that is a choice also. That family can and do find the darned things to whine about. Or at least in my opinion they are the “little stuff” in life.

I feel if you cannot change something you dislike, why sweat it? If you can work to make a change, and chose to; then do it! Don’t whine about it.

I must confess I think women have the patent on this. Someone once commented to me that all cats had to be female. I didn’t agree with that then; but I do now.

I have often commented that I believe I would rather be a part of an organization of men, than one of women. Men’s organizations don’t seem to sweat the small stuff.

Not much is worse than working with a group of women in an organization or an office. Many even get concerned if they are not concerned at that moment. Seems it doesn’t take them long to find the whiner button.

I tend to compare our own life like a grain of sand on a beach. When you consider how big this world is, we are not even as large as that grain of sand.

The political jockeying seems so mundane, especially when you consider how small our space is.

The point of this is life truly is too short to sweat the small stuff. By choice we all determine what that small stuff is. Many times we have wasted so much energy on that, if some “big stuff” comes along, we have lost or wasted the ability to deal with it.

So, give your roses to the living, consider The Golden Rule, and most of all, try to remember you have choices. And don’t whine about how others make their choices. Why waste time judging others? Many waste so much precious time on this, they forget to smell the roses.