A constant deterrent of a positive mental attitude is the habit of looking back at past transgressions, issues and hardships and replaying them over and over in our heads so that we expect nothing better for the future and end up creating more of the same for ourselves.  How do we know when we are doing this?  We look at our present situations and count how many times and for how long history has repeated itself.  How do we stop?  The obvious answer would be to never look back.  This is not always easy.  In some cases, looking back can be helpful when you are trying to raise your spirits by reliving a moment when you were feeling on top of the world, or to boost your confidence by recounting how many times you succeeded at anything.

Scrap booking is a great way of preserving past memories, keeping family histories, and helping families stay connected through separations of generations and/or miles.  Most everyone enjoys looking through a pretty scrapbook and reliving our finer moments. I particularly enjoy making them. 

Now here is something everyone knows, but I want you to think a little more about it:  Nobody makes a scrapbook or scrapbook page of a terrible experience.  And even if there was someone who actually did, I cannot picture this scrapbook proudly displayed on a coffee table, nor can I imagine anyone else wanting to look at it.

Consider your memories as mental scrapbooks that you look at regularly.  Are they pleasing to “look” at?  How often do you view them?  What does viewing them do to your mental attitude?  Do you like to show them to others?

Here is a fun exercise that you and I can do together: we will create a mental scrapbook.

First of all, when we create scrapbooks, we choose certain pictures that capture a particular moment and enhance the memory with visual aids like matching colors and pretty doo-dads.  For this exercise we will pretend to create a scrapbook layout of a particularly painful experience of mine that I am sharing with you for the purpose of visual illumination only, since I know in detail how I would have “enhanced” this particular memory at one time.

My daughter’s christening was held on the day of my 27th birthday.  After the ceremony at the church we all went to a rented hall where we had an open bar and disc jockey.  It was a large occasion, not at all the nice family party that I wanted to have.