It’s coming up on four weeks until spring.

I’m busted: just as guilty of frittering away the day when I’m holed up inside when the wind chill is too cold outside to go out of the apartment.

I’ve written that I value being in tune with the natural world: to be in synch with the seasons. Fall is the harvest to enjoy the bounty of our labor. Winter is the season to hibernate and to clear out the old and make new plans. Spring is the rebirth of ourselves to have the energy to carry out our goals. Summer is sweet and the living can be easier in that season.

This is how our lives evolve: season-by-season. Yes: I do value respecting the forces of nature. I value living near greenery or within an easy commute to a park. The goal in New York City a couple of years ago was to plant a million trees.

If you’re going to hibernate, I make the case for doing it in style. Lie in bed for hours in elegant pajamas. Listen to the radio. Read a fashion magazine.

Yet sometimes the lure of doing nothing must be heeded. Part of living life-even for those of us who are not in recovery-is to recover from the daily grind. To rest and recharge our batteries on the days when we’re not active outside.

A typical winter’s day, Chez Chris:

7 a.m. – wake up automatically without alarm clock and listen to the radio when the alarm does come on.

morning – work on a writing project.

afternoon – fritter away my tax refund by shopping on the Internet.

late afternoon – install CDs on my computer from iTunes.

night – listen to radio.

next day: lather rinse repeat all of the above.

It doesn’t help when Presidents’ Day is an official holiday and baby it’s cold outside so you stay indoors shopping all over again on the Internet.

Do not try this at home: I don’t recommend a person goes into debt using their credit card.

I do recommend hibernating in the winter. The siren’s song of lying in bed all day can’t be resisted.

Five days later your packages will arrive in the mail.

What’s not to like?

A poster on a wall beckons: Don’t Give Up The Fight.

I will go to my grave fighting for the right of every person who experiences mental or emotional distress to get the right help right away to halt disability.

I’ve been employed as the Health Guide at HealthCentral’s schizophrenia website for nine years now. Easily five years ago I wrote at HealthCentral that sometimes getting out of bed warrants a recovery Nobel Prize.

It’s hard. I won’t discount how hard it is. Yet I prefer to focus on the positive because hope heals.

It’s possible I’m doing something right because this blog kicked off only seven months ago in the summer and a ton of readers are tuning in. I give a “mille grazie”-a thousand thank you’s-to every reader and to my loyal followers for tuning in.

It is part of my biology-my chemical nature-that I’m an eternal optimist. I was born with a fighting spirit to not give up. My mother had seven miscarriages before I was born. So I must have been determined to be born: to give my mother the baby she always wanted.

I tell you now and I will tell you always: don’t give up the fight to have a better life.
I understand that people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses often have to fight to be taken seriously. We have to fight to be given crumbs from the table when everyone else feasts at the banquet.

This is no joke. I do not take this lightly even though I have an irrepressible sense of humor.

Certainly it’s hard living with schizophrenia or another mental illness.
Yet the solution is not for the mainstream media to parrot the hell we’re in ad nauseam without offering ideas for solutions and techniques to make our lives easier.

At HealthCentral, I write news articles that focus on schizophrenia recovery strategies.

I’m going to end this blog entry with a request that readers post comments about future blog topics they might like me to write about. In the earlier incarnation of my blog a reader wanted me to write about negative symptoms and I obliged.

In the next blog entry I will talk about the beauty of hibernating in the winter.

You don’t realize when you’re 22 that one day you’ll be 50 and your loved ones will be in your life for a limited time.

I’m going to write at HealthCentral in the coming months about bereavement for individuals with mental illnesses. About how parents need to develop a succession plan for their son or daughter who has schizophrenia or another MI.

Nowhere have I seen this issue addressed by anyone anywhere in any medium. Not even by so-called mental health organizations.

It seems so unfair that anyone can develop a life-ending disease. You’re not ever prepared for this. Nor are you prepared for any ordinary loss of your family members.

I like to think that by the time a person is 50 they should’ve done 3 things on their “bucket list.” I was kind of odd in that I typed up a list of “30 by 50”: 30 things I had achieved by the time I was 50. I could count and itemize 30 things. This seems unusual yet there you go.

Yet right now as I confront that the years are gone I think it’s foolish to measure your self-worth by the things you’ve achieved in life. As driven as I am, I don’t think accomplishments count.

I think the measure of a man (and of a woman) is his or her character: how they treated others with dignity, were they kind and compassionate, did they hold the door open for the person behind them.

I’m not impressed with someone’s status in society even if they’re a JD or an MD. Martin Luther King famously told us we should only judge someone by “the content of his character.”

Age brings wisdom. You learn how to pace yourself, to rest when you need to rest, to value what’s truly important and stop focusing on things that don’t matter.

This involves acting with grace and forgiveness towards yourself and others.

If you’re already 50, you’re too old to focus on the negative because doing so will only age your faster.

I’m facing things right now that all of us face on the cusp of 50. It can help to “let go, let life” or “let go, let God” tell you what to do.

Most things aren’t a big deal in the scheme of life.

Yet confronting the loss of your family members isn’t something that people diagnosed with mental illnesses should have to suffer alone.

I’m going to write about bereavement at HealthCentral in the coming months.

The title Mind Blossoming came to me right now as a way to describe what happens when we get rid of the old, the outdated thoughts gathering dust in our heads.

It starts when we assess what’s holding us back and have the courage to confront what we need to do to move ahead.

Winter is a time to hibernate so it’s perfect to stay inside and get clear with yourself about the goals you have that you can start in the spring.

Spring, to me, is the ideal time to start something new. Winter is the ideal time to discard what a person no longer needs in their life.

As soon as you clear out your head you’ll be tempted to fill it up again with thoughts. How can each of us be able to live without obsessing over things?

It comes down to self-acceptance. For a lot of us, we’re used to beating ourselves up over our imagined faults and shortcomings. Winter is three months and three months is too long to continue in this dark vein of negativity.

I recommend in my book Flourish keeping a Feelings/Facts log. Write down each feeling you have about something going on in your life. On the next line, write down a fact to counter what you feel.

Feelings are real and true yet sometimes they cloud over a different truth. Title the first line feeling: and title the next line Fact: and go down the page line-by-line.

At the end, it should be easier to think more clearly about the possibilities of your life not the perils of what you feel is going on.

I’d like to hear from readers if you try this exercise and whether it works out.

Next week I will return with a guest blogger. A best friend of mine, Myung, has graciously allowed me to publish here a couple of essays he wrote for talks he gave to peers.

The first column I had published in a newspaper was an article on doing spring cleaning in January to beat the winter blues and blahs. It was published in 1990: the start of the new decade.

I suggested that a person clear the cobwebs from her mind as well as from her closet. That the junk piles of our minds get cluttered over the years. And it can be scary to let go of a thought or a pattern of thinking that has become ingrained.

It’s true I recommend starting the process of change in January first by clearing out the past. Rather than start in winter, I recommend making the actual changes in early Spring after a person has readied herself to do so.

By the way, there’s nine weeks to spring so it will be here sooner than we think.

I do recommend carting your cast-offs to the Salvation Army or Goodwill or other local thrift shop in January to clear the way for new things coming in in the spring.

My ethic that I’ve adhered to for the last 10 years is simple: when one new thing comes in my apartment I get rid of or donate one old thing.

This “in/out” devotion keeps your closets and drawers from becoming graveyards of unused stuff. You shouldn’t have to move around endless objects you don’t use just to get to the things you do need.

I also recommend the “ease of use” mantra: a storage item shouldn’t be more trouble than it’s worth for a person to use it. I nixed buying a storage ottoman because it would have been a hassle to open it up a certain way all the time just to reach into its cavernous inside to get everything stored there.

The Container Store sells Oskar 2-piece boxes in gray, turquoise, green and pink. They’re only $19.99 for the set and can be recycled when they get old and beat up.

Spring cleaning is also a mindset and I will talk more on Thursday about clearing the junk out of our heads.

I wanted to write about how changing your perception can change your life. Thinking positively is possible if you decide to shift your focus to what’s going right in your life and in the world.

If you focus on the negative, you won’t have the ability to change your life because you’ll be stuck in an endless tape loop of negativity.

I’m going to give an analogy that is corny yet it is quite effective. My friend thought this up so I can’t take the credit. He told me: “There’s ten weeks until spring.” So I decided to keep a Spring-O-Meter to count down each week until spring arrives.

In reality, the winter is the exact length of time that other seasons are. It can seem longer because it’s colder and it snows often. So as far as seasons go, it’s not my favorite. My favorite time is the late summer into early fall.

Thus I realized if I focused on the weeks until spring arrived I would be able to be proactive in the winter.

Another truth comes courtesy of a Beyonce quote:

“If you live your life with kindness and give other people a great energy, that beauty and great energy come back to you.”

You’ve most likely met a person whose rudeness or other negative behavior is like a dead weight when you meet them: it sinks you down right away and you feel oppressed just being around them.

I don’t want to be that dead weight. As winter continues, I seek in my blogs to uplift and inspire readers throughout these cold, cruel months.

Take heart. Spring is soon to be only 9 weeks away. Hibernate in the winter and be OK with this fallow period. Spring will come again and with it the chance to bumble about outside.

I’ll write in here next week about doing spring cleaning in January to beat the winter blues and blahs.

You can’t write the ending of the story of the your life before you’ve started that story.

You can’t give up on yourself at any point in your life regardless of whether or not you’ve achieved the things you wanted to by that point.

It’s entirely possible to live to 75 or 80 years old if you exercise, eat right, limit alcohol intake and don’t smoke cigarettes and don’t use street drugs. The chance of a woman living to 85 years old shoots up 74 percent if she follows this advice.

Adopting a healthy lifestyle enables you to have “life in your years” no matter the number of “years in your life.”

I tell readers not to give up because we don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future. And where we are today in our lives doesn’t determine where we’ll be in the future. The road in recovery and the road to success isn’t straight and narrow and doesn’t run a predictable course. Our lives are often long and winding to get to where we want to be.

Have faith that things can change if only you change your perception of what you can do.

I continue here from the last blog entry because I know positive change is possible no matter how old you are, no matter what your “thing” in life is, and no matter what happened to you in the past.

The secret to my success is that I wouldn’t be defeated. Even when I failed, I wasn’t down for the count because I realized I could do something differently to achieve my goal or I could change the goal I had to one that was better and could be achieved.

Is it possible most people get defeated and give up when they fail? If that sounds like you, you can change your tactic. This involves not giving yourself a restrictive deadline by which to achieve a goal. It involves setting goals to achieve things in your life that are consistent with your priorities, your values, and who you are. Acting false to yourself to get ahead in life will cause ill health.

You might ask how do I know the tide can turn in a person’s life at any point in time?

Here’s the proof:

Ever since I was a teenager, I did some kind of exercise. Starting with simple exercises I did on the floor in my bedroom. Then at various gyms from the time I was 27 to the time I was 34. I turned 39 and joined the current gym yet only did the treadmill, Zumba or Pilates for about 4 years.

At 45 going into 46, I suddenly decided I had to do strength training. It wasn’t until I was 45 years old that I became a hardcore fitness buff.

This is proof that things can change for the better at any point in a person’s life. From 39 to 44, I did the treadmill, Zumba or Pilates sporadically. Then, for about a year, I didn’t exercise.

Then, bingo, at 45 I started to power lift. Within one year of training, I dropped one pant size. That’s not the point. The point is you might have been a couch potato. You might be at a point in your life where it’s inconceivable that you can get there from here. It might seem like it’s impossible to do what you want to do because you don’t __________________ (fill in the blank) or you haven’t ever _______________(fill in the blank) done this thing before.

Bollocks. You can do these things, no matter whether you’ve done them before or whether your fallow period has lasted years and years instead of just three weeks or three months.

Fallow periods are necessary. Woodshedding is necessary and I talked about this in the first couple of blog entries here.

I’ll end here by telling readers how to get the faith that you can turn things around at any point in your life.

You take action in your mind when you’re not able to take action in your life. You write down a 5-year plan and list in detail what you want to achieve. You refer to the plan as often as you need to. If you can’t tackle your ultimate goal right now, you tackle a goal you can absolutely positively achieve instead.

Starting with a simple goal and achieving it can give you the confidence to achieve a goal that’s slightly beyond your reach.

This involves taking action every day in the direction of your dream(s). This “action” can be as simple as reading books on the topic. It can be as simple as reading about how successful people got to where they are in life. It can involve doing nothing when you’ve reached a plateau and then one day getting so upset with doing nothing that you take action.

I went to library school with a woman who was in her early seventies. At a time in her life when most people are slowing down, she decided to obtain a Masters degree.

Take a tip from this woman: it’s not ever too late to change your life for the better.

That’s where the story begins: where you are today. And today isn’t the end of your life, even if you’re 35 or 50 or 65.

Trust me, everyone feels like they’ve failed at some point. Even a 22 year old woman can feel like she hasn’t achieved anything even though she has the rest of her life ahead of her

I’ll end here by telling you to think differently.

Envision having a better life. Know that you’re in the driver’s seat even when you have to make a pit stop or take a detour. As hard as life can get, always keep in your mind your vision of your life’s purpose.

Refrain from writing the ending of your story before you’ve even started the narrative.