Life can be best described like a movie - Fast and Furious.

One moment you could be just hours away from embarking on a dream trip for 2 weeks, sailing with the NZ Navy with some of the brightest youth leaders in NZ and then the next, without any warning, you could have all of that hope and happiness ripped away from you, hours before you’re about to travel. Because you see lads, if you hadn’t figured it out already, that’s what happened to me earlier this year. And if I’m being honest lads, it became way too easy that week for me to be down in the dumps and seeing only the negative side of life.   

If you didn’t get what I was trying to say with that story, it’s that it's rather hard to be positive when times get hard. Life is never going to be easy. Never in a million years. It's filled with challenges and treacherous choices, the hardest of which for most of us, is deciding whether to put your left or right shoe on first thing in the morning. And during the hard times, it always seems like it won’t get better, until it does, eventually. 

But is there any way to help make the challenging times better? Make a bad day somewhat better? One of the major ways that can work is making a list of things you can manage. Say you've got a sports practice, 3 different internals due within a week, homework to catch up on, music lessons to attend and all the while you've got your mates hounding you to hang out. Now I'm not saying to ignore your internals but at some stage you need to step back from everything that's bothering you and choose the things that you find enjoyment from. That might mean missing a sports practice or reducing the amount of school work you're doing for a night, just so that you can do something you enjoy, something that makes you feel good about life. And I promise you lads, if you find time to do what you enjoy, your day will always get better. 

Abraham Lincoln once said ‘We can complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses’. At the end of the day, it’s our choice whether we choose to be positive during hard times or stay negative. At the end of the day, it's only a mindset and we have the ability to grow or change our mindset.

In conclusion to the story I started earlier, not going on the trip turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the area I was travelling to was hit with a magnitude 8.1 earthquake that could have been a potentially life threatening situation. So there really is also a bright side to every negative story.