Late Fall

Everyone tells me that positive thinking is particularly important at my stage of life. This is a ridiculous claim, as anyone knows who has ever tried to use positive thinking as a tool. The world doesn’t change because you want it to. Your body doesn’t feel better because you talk yourself into believing it. We tell ourselves these lies because we want to feel as though we have some sort of control over what happens to us—even those things that are completely out of our hands. So we pretend our conscious thoughts are more powerful than anything else because we want so much for them to be so.
I know better. Positive thinking isn’t the miracle cure that we want it to be.

This is life. After summer, the green leaves always change colors and fall off the trees. Dogs die, no matter how much you love them. Land is sold, even if you used to tell yourself you were going to die on the property. And people get old.
Even me.