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If we give up, we cannot succeed. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-02

The SCOTUS sure hit us with a few whammies over the past few days, didn’t it? Between affirmative action, LGBTQ equality, and student loans getting knocked down like tenpins, I’m sure they’re feeling very proud of themselves. After all, they showed us where we actually stand in the pecking order as far as they’re concerned, and they’d like nothing better than for us to quiet down and just wait for the next round of bad news.

A few years ago, I would have just grumbled and then settled in to endure until other people who knew more and were better at solving political problems stepped in. But if all you do is endure in the hopes that things will someday improve, the best you’ll get is an eventual regression to the mean, if you’re lucky. I think we deserve better than that, don’t you?

So, my cat Sam, featured in that picture above? He has had hyperthyroidism for at least two years. Fortunately there is a fairly easy treatment (twice a day pills), though as anyone who’s had cats knows, getting them to take pills is not the easiest thing in the world. He also started having seizures out of the blue last year, and a cat suddenly having seizures in old age is never a good thing.

But you know what else? He’s still with me. The seizures went away on their own with him no worse for wear. And he’s stable as far as the hyperthyroidism goes. He still schemes on how to get into my lap even though he’s old and doesn’t have great balance or strength anymore. I often shooed him away from that when he was younger (I often like to stand up suddenly and move around), but he never stopped trying to get to his favorite spot, and lately, I’ve been helping him get there since he can’t quite do it on his own anymore.

That’s the power of positive thinking for you. If you keep believing that you can do something, if you never give up on it, you make it possible to actually do that thing.

I have another example of how this works. Several years ago, although I didn’t look it, I was substantially overweight, edging past the obese range. And I couldn’t make myself lose it, though I was keeping it from raising significantly at least. It was affecting my mood, my energy, and my sleep. After I got pushed into a sleep study, they recommended one of those CPAP devices to me. Now, I wasn’t too keen on it, especially when I found out that I was essentially going to be renting the device. I didn’t know the cost, but I knew that it wouldn’t solve any of the underlying problems with my sleep.

So, with more than a bit of trepidation, I decided to start making lifestyle changes, like cutting certain things out of my diet and indulging in regular exercise. And you know what? It worked. It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t easy, but in the past five years I’ve managed to bring myself down to a healthy weight through nothing more than just making small changes in my behavior and keeping at them till I made them stick.

But it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t made those changes and kept at them, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

So that’s really the takeaway. That weight loss I talked about, I had occasional setbacks where I ate too much and my weight went back up. But the key takeaway is that I never said “well, that was a good try but it’s not going to work”, instead “I’ll do better tomorrow” and then I actually went and did better too.

This goes for political stuff as well. I wrote this article because of a commenter who said “well, the Senate 2024 maps are very bad, so we just need a time machine to go back and fix things”. And I was like, seriously, a time machine is the best thing you can think of? We can’t change the past, but we can learn from it and do better in the future. In fact, that’s the only way we can ever hope to make things better.

Thanks for reading. I hope you take some inspiration from my writing here. If you did, go and see what you can do for yourself, as that helps to inspire other people.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/2/2178892/-If-we-give-up-we-cannot-succeed

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