Remember in the film Inside Out, when Sadness changes memories from happy (yellow) to sad (blue)?

It has always disturbed me that the change was portrayed as irreversible… happy memories become sad when there is a major life change, and that’s it. From now on, they are sad.

Last year, I drove my family coast to coast for six months in an RV. Amazing. TONS of happy memories with them, even though my wife and I were on our last legs of a seventeen year marital failure. Portland to San Diego to Key West to Bar Harbor and back, with some sixty stops between. 25,000 miles. Six months. 23 States. Wow.

Soon after we returned, when I traveled for business several times a month, I often found myself in the exact same places where we… and then, we… and it was so fun to… together. But then, I was flooded with sadness at the failed marriage and split home.

My emotions were touchy just then, in the middle of the divorce. But I was dissatisfied with having all these great memories of sharing places with my kids tainted. Sadness. All the good, lost.

I refused. I began searching my soul, asking… how to preserve the wonder and joy.

Then, an answer found me. Each time I traveled, when I felt that poignant sadness, looking down at King Beach on Lake Tahoe from 30,000′, where I played with my kids in the clear cool water fourteen months ago… or looking at the picture of my six year old boy in Key Largo, where he learned to swim and snorkel in the same afternoon… or standing on the Santa Monica Pier at the end of Route 66, which we followed for hundreds of miles on our trip… or in the Pacific Ocean waves, on the very beach where they learned to boogey board… I saw, I felt the pull of negative emotions… and I chose gratitude instead.

I chose to allow my heart to be filled with gratitude: that my work allowed me to travel with them, that we sold our house and didn’t find the little farm we wanted so we hit the road instead, that my wife was game to try it, that my kids had such an amazing time, that I got to live an incredible dream with them and show them this country from nine and a half feet – the places and history and flora and fauna.

Gratitude. It salvaged so many memories for me, and left my heart in a healthier, still-ready-to-love state, instead of hiding in the darkness and sadness I feared.

Gratitude has turned my sadness back to joy.
 

Inside Out is a 2015 film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures.
Pictured: Joy. ©2015 Disney•Pixar. All Rights Reserved.
All intellectual property rights are acknowledged and honored.