Being such a delightful day with the warming sun and no wind, I found myself moving about and performing my errands with a bit more of a lighter spirit. There were more than normal phone calls this morning which is yet another indicator of the buyers awakening from their long winter slumber.
I’ve been working with an elderly gentleman for the past several months in attempting to find him something that will fit his needs. Too many times in my conversations with him, I find his outlook on the world around him to be very much on the negative side. Seems nearly every home I’ve shown him has some small disagreeable feature. I did find one for him about a month ago which was everything was looking for and more. He made several offers on it but we couldn’t seem to come together on price with the seller. At the time, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t buy it since he does have the money. He called today and I found myself trapped for about 20 minutes in listening to his negativity about the real estate market, the city, the people, and likely anything and everything around him that he could think of at the time. I heard the words no, not, and never in nearly every sentence. After today, I don’t think I will be working very hard at finding him anything.
I happened to be walking into a building today and was taken aside by yet another highly negative woman. She lost her husband some years ago and I believe she has become more bitter since then. Normally she starts talking about the people in her neighborhood who just can’t seem to do anything right. Since my discovering her ability to turn nearly everything to the dark side, I work even harder in my conversations with her to turn everything she says into something positive. She doesn’t normally chat very long because she’s found I don’t wallow around with her in all the negativity. Just as I was walking away, she yelled, “I think the city better stop paying so attention to the downtown and pay more attention to the needs of us taxpayers.” She knows how much I work to help grown the central business district so that comment was one last little zinger at me.
People like these have no idea how much they affect the lives of people around them. We all must learn to be careful in not allowing ourselves to be overly affected by what comes out of the chronic naysayers mouths—it pollutes one’s perception.
