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Most of the time when we think of vacuums, we think of them as being a generally helpful item to have around the house. If your carpet is full of dirt, bits of hair that you’ve shed, crumbs from food that you dropped off of your plate, and millions of tiny pieces of ripped up paper from the first draft of your business proposal that you hated, then a vacuum can come in handy.

Even though vacuums can clean up messes that we don’t want lying around on our floor, they can also end up sucking up things that we didn’t mean to get sucked up. Things, that are of great importance to us…

Keeping that in mind, let’s take a moment to look at this scenario…

Carol has been putting off vacuuming her floor for awhile now. Over the past few months she has let dirt and trash pile up on her floor, and she hasn’t been able to get around to cleaning it up because between her new job and the school work for the online class she started taking last month and between balancing her time between her new significant other and her friends and family, she simply hasn’t had enough time to tackle the catastrophe that is her bedroom floor.  Now, by some miracle, Carol has found a free day all to herself, and she decides that she’s going to spend her free day cleaning her house. She makes up her mind to get the worst area of her house, her filthy bedroom floor, out of the way first.

As Carol powers up the vacuum, she jumps slightly at the sound of the unfamiliar thunderous sound that’s presently filling the air, and ss she starts to move the vacuum cleaner in a fluid, rhythmic back and forth motion, she marvels at how clean her floor is becoming. Her floor looks practically brand new and she can’t remember the last time she saw it look like that. After about ten minutes of cleaning, her floor looks immaculate, and just as she is about to put the vacuum cleaner away, Carol realizes that she hasn’t gotten the area of the floor underneath her dresser yet. Because the vacuum is too big and bulky to reach under there, she pulls out the vacuum attachment and gets ready to suck up the unsuspecting dirt that lives under her dresser. As she continues to vacuum in the small place under her dresser, she starts to hear a strange noise. The air flow doesn’t sound nearly as strong as it did a few seconds ago, so thinking that something big has gotten stuck in front of the nozzle, Carol pulls out the attachment from under the dresser. As she lifts up the nozzle to her face she notices that the love letter that her great grandmother Jean wrote to her husband, Carol’s great grandfather Bill, while he was overseas fighting in WWI is hovering in front of the opening of the vacuum attachment. She is instantly relieved that the note wasn’t sucked up, and as she goes to move it from in front of the nozzle, Carol accidentally bumps it and the note is sucked up into the vacuum.

Immediately she turns off the vacuum and opens it up to get to the vacuum bag, but unfortunately for Carol, that precious handwritten note that her great grandfather gave to his son, and that he gave to his only daughter, and that she passed down to her, has been shredded into hundreds of little pieces of paper. Carol sifts through every single piece of dirt in that bag until her hands and floor end up becoming dirtier than they were when she first started vacuuming, and after shifting through the vacuum bag for an hour she eventually resigns from the task at hand and acknowledges that the note will never be put back together again.

Positive thinker, if someone is a positive force in your life, then he or she won’t suck up the good in your life. These positive forces will be there to support you and will even occasionally help to suck up the bad things in your life. People who are a negative force will do just the opposite. Those individuals who are negative forces in your life will be like the vacuum in the story above, and they will try and take your happiness away. They’ll suck up everything that you hold dear and valuable in your life so that you are left feeling miserable and discontented.

If you have someone in your life that is sucking up the happiness in your life like a vacuum sucking up a beloved family token then it would be beneficial for you to remove this person from your life. It’s never too late to make a change to get rid of people from your life that make you unhappy. Before that individual sucks up all of your happiness into his or her happiness sucking nozzle, remove yourself from the line of fire and go away from the nozzle before this person has completely taken away your happiness.

Positive thinker, if you want to have a happy life but the people around you are preventing you from being happy because they have a habit of taking away your joy, then make a change to associate with people who help to suck up the bad from your life instead of the good.

Remember positive thinker, “Do not let anyone become a vacuum and suck the happiness out of you. Pull the plug.”