Something by Virtue of Nothing: Restoration

Today was spent in an attempt to bring restoration to all the doubts that managed to find me with their ridiculously oversized wings. Happily, I have restored my peace, and it certainly helped playing with Gimp this afternoon after having been inspired by this post.
There's a reason we are told to take our minds "off" things, to take a breath of fresh air. What helped me today was getting an email from a friend who completely understood my candid outpouring to her yesterday, also, a visit from another friend at lunch brought flowers of joy to my heart.
I am trying to develop an eye for serendipity - for those happy accidents that happen in life that are not coincidental (I am not a believe of coincidence). I want to learn to collect them. I have noticed that all it takes to spoil my day is one negative thing: a single negative seems to have more of an influence on me than many positive things.
So, I've been trying to look inside each day and find the helpful elements that I may have minimised, or forgotten about due to a negative experience.
A lovely reader who stopped by this blog yesterday is reading a book on cognitive dissonance - which I'd never heard of. So I googled it yesterday, and found that it explains so elegantly what took me years to get over as a teacher, namely, if students do not want to work to acquire a new idea, they will write it off as stupid. Unfortunately, this phenomenon can also be present among coworkers, which can lead to rather uncomfortable situations.
The "helpful element" here is that now I have a name for that which ails me: I should see that I'm not alone and that it isn't necessary to feel nervous when people in my immediate surroundings think similarly to each other and differently from me. You see, I find such situations claustrophobic. The truth cannot be stuffed into a pocket or be coerced into one person's brain.
It is important to carry within our hearts a context that will allow us to grow as individuals, and it is necessary to know that this context will not always be immediately apparent.
Now that I've written all of that, I realise that the image I made no longer really illustrates what this post has become, but suffice it to say that the image has many layers and textures - and hopefully, we feel the freedom to develop the same within our souls... P.S. do you see the doves in the bottom-middle photo?