Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that shape our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author, activist, attorney, and the host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XM's Urban View, Channel 126. If you like what you're about to hear, go ahead and give us five stars and then tell everybody that you know. And if you don't like it, just, child, keep it to yourself and pray our strength. Okay? Thank you so much.

Also, don't forget to check out my YouTube page, Lurie Daniel Favor's Media, where you should subscribe, like, and share because then you'll get notified when I post videos from my show, which I do just about every single day and when I go live with my YouTube audience. We got a lot to unpack. and because of that, we are going to go straight into our opening segment, which is usually the conversation about the news that we're going to have. But technically, the opening segment is our moment of gratitude. It's the ritual that we do every day on this show. Because the stories we talk about and the concepts we delve into are heavy. This show has been described as all shot, no chases. So we're doing a lot in this little two hours that we have together.

And because of that, and because frankly, life is life for all of us. We have a ritual on this show called a moment of gratitude that is one that

gives us the capacity to intentionally tap into a set of emotions that will allow us to sort of root ourselves in a sense of joy,

gratitude, and appreciation. And the ritual is super, super simple, and it's super necessary because

when you're doing the work of Black Talklandia, you don't want to be depressed and sad and

woe is me and you don't want to be how many Negro spirituals and like shaking with a shawl

on your shoulders rocking back and forth on the rocket chair. You don't want to do that. Well, certainly not all the time. Every once in a while you deserve a good shawl around the shoulder, church mother rocking back and forth in a rocking chair situation. I'm not going to deny you that. I'm not going to deny you that. We just can't stay in that space. So the ritual is called a moment of gratitude, and it is pretty simple.

So simple. In fact, it goes a little something like this. In just a minute, you're going to hear music. The music, which you will clearly hear from the first strands of the words that you hear sung to you or really be an invitation. And that invitation is one that will invite you to join the rest of us because we will collectively begin taking the slowest, the deepest, the most lung capacity expanding and joyful heart invigorating, the most weary soul-uplifting and positive emotion boosting, the most troubled mind cleansing, the most amazingly, phenomenally juicy breath that you've ever taken with a couple million people at once as we kick off our most important segment of every single day. It is time for our moment of gratitude. Every day, folks, every day we got to do it and every day we got to do it and every day it matters.

Shout out to the team.

Today we are continuing, in addition to me being grateful for all of you in Urban View and the Nubians,

today we are continuing with our mini focus on attitude because there is so much coming at us and we are in onslaught mode it feels like we are

in a constant either a roller coaster or a water slide just constant constant constant motion in terms of

the things we are expected to carry the news we have to balance the calling upon our lives that we have to navigate around all of these things. It's a lot. It's a lot. And as we think about the things that we can control, one of the things that I always tell y'all is there's very little in our lives that we can control. Very little that we can control. In fact, I've given you all this example before, as it was shared with me, if you imagine the things that you can control in your life, imagine them being what you can see on your cell phone screen. So if you look at your cell phone screen or you remember what it was to have a cell phone in your hand if you're driving because you should be not driving with your phone in your hand. But if you remember how big your cell phone screen is, if you look at your cell phone screen, the width and the length

and the depth of that cell phone, that represents what we can control within the broader

realm of our lives. That's it. But now when you put the cell phone down and you look around

a room and you see all the people in a room, you see the other things in a room, the other items

in the room, you see all the other things that make up the room that are not contained within the three by five or whatever it is your cell phone is in terms of dimensions. That represents all of the variables. We absolutely have no control over. It doesn't matter what you do. It even represents variables, not only that we have no control over, that we probably don't even know anything about, right? We don't even realize that those variables exist because they are

beyond the realm of our control. So today, as we continue with this excerpt from a book called

The New Human Revolution, this is volume 13, and this is a continuing focus on attitude,

because what we can control is our attitude. Can't control the circumstances.

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