Positively You | Clean Water for Daily Wellness & Positive Living

From Books That Inspire to Water That Energizes: Why Clean Water Is the Real Foundation of a Positive You

Posted in Positive Living | Tagged positivity, clean-water, better-life

Oh, where do I even begin.

If you’ve been around here long enough, you might remember when this little corner of the internet looked very different. We’re talking dial-up speeds, clunky guestbooks, and a homepage that probably took four minutes to load on a good day. This was the late 1990s, and I was running Positively-you.com out of what was essentially a converted spare bedroom with a secondhand desk and a very loud inkjet printer that I was convinced hated me personally.

Back then, the whole site was a carefully curated online bookstore. And not just any books — motivational books, self-help books, the kind of dog-eared, highlighted, passed-between-friends kind of books that genuinely changed people’s lives. I was obsessed. I’d spend weekends writing up little reviews and mini-essays about whatever I was reading, sharing what resonated, and letting readers know why this book, right now, might be the one that cracks something open for them.

I remember the emails. God, the emails. Someone from rural Minnesota wrote to tell me that a book she found through this site helped her get through her divorce with her sense of humor intact. A retired teacher in his early seventies told me he’d finally started painting again — something he’d abandoned at twenty-three — because a title he picked up here reminded him it wasn’t too late. There was a college student who wrote three paragraphs to say thank you, and I could feel how much she meant it in every single word. I printed that one out. I think I still have it somewhere in a folder I refuse to throw away.

There were some genuinely surreal moments too. A mention in The New York Times. A blurb in Forbes, of all places, about independent online content creators building authentic communities before “authentic community” became the kind of phrase that got used in PowerPoint decks by people who’d never actually built one. I’m not going to pretend those moments didn’t feel validating, because they absolutely did. But honestly? The emails from readers meant more. They still do.

So that’s where we came from. And now here we are, twenty-something years later, and the site has grown and changed the way most things that survive long enough eventually do. Which brings me to what I actually want to talk about today — the thing I’ve been sitting with for a few years now and finally feel ready to write about properly.

Here’s the truth that kind of snuck up on me while I wasn’t looking: all those years of reading and sharing books about positivity and mental strength and building a better life, I was working from the inside out. Mindset first. Habits second. Perspective, gratitude, resilience — all deeply important, none of it wasted. I stand by every bit of it.

But somewhere along the way I started noticing something. Something almost embarrassingly basic.

The most grounded, energized, clear-headed days I ever had? They had a few things in common that weren’t about affirmations or journaling. They were the days I slept well, moved my body a little, ate something real, and — this is the part I kept overlooking — drank enough genuinely clean water.

I know. I know how that sounds. Bear with me.

A few years back, I took a trip that sort of reshuffled my priorities in a way I didn’t expect. I was visiting a region where the water situation was genuinely precarious — not in a dramatic disaster-movie way, but in the slow, grinding way that affects communities quietly over time. The water from the tap had a smell. A taste. The locals had adapted, the way humans always adapt, but you could see it in the daily fabric of life. People were tired in a way that sleep didn’t fully fix. Kids seemed lethargic in the afternoons. There was a kind of low-level heaviness that I initially attributed to other factors — economics, isolation, all of it real and valid — but the more I paid attention, the more I kept coming back to the water.

I spent a few days drinking bottled water I’d brought with me, and I noticed my own thinking felt sharper than it had in weeks. My mood lifted. I woke up one morning genuinely excited about the day before I’d even had coffee, which, if you know me, is unusual. And when I came home and started reading more about what clean water actually does — or doesn’t do — to the human body and brain, something clicked into place that I haven’t been able to unclick since.

This is what I mean when I talk about Water Wellness now. Not in a detox-trend, spa-menu kind of way. In the most grounded, lived-in, everyday kind of way. Water is so basic that we stop thinking about it. It’s the thing that’s just there, hopefully, coming out of a tap. But what’s actually in it — or what’s been stripped out of it, or added to it — matters in ways that ripple outward into everything else we’re trying to build.

Mental clarity isn’t just about meditation and screen time. It’s also about what’s literally running through your body all day. And daily-wellness isn’t a supplement or a morning routine — it’s the accumulated effect of every small thing, including the most unremarkable one: what you’re drinking.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, and I say this as someone who spent decades in the mindset-and-books world: true Positive Living has to start with foundations. Physical ones. You can read every inspirational book ever written — and I have read many of them, some of them twice — but if your body is running on water that’s doing it no favors, the words only go so far.

I think about the reader from Minnesota who got through her divorce with her humor intact. I think about how much harder that would have been if she’d been chronically dehydrated, or if the water in her area had been laced with things her body was quietly spending energy fighting off. We don’t think about that. We credit the book. We credit her resilience. And both those things are real. But the body is the vessel, and the vessel deserves clean water.

This isn’t me getting preachy. At least, I hope it isn’t. It’s me saying that after twenty-five-plus years of caring about human flourishing in all its forms, I’ve started paying attention to Sustainable Living and Environmental Positivity not as political positions but as deeply personal ones. The environment isn’t out there, separate from us. It’s in us, every time we take a sip of something.

The new sections of this site are going to reflect all of that. We’re keeping everything we’ve always loved — the conversations about mindful-growth, the recommendations, the personal essays, all of it. But we’re expanding into territory that I think is long overdue for a site called Positively You.

Natural purity in the water we drink. What eco-positive choices actually look like in a regular household, without demanding that you become a different person overnight. The connection between a cleaner environment and a clearer mind. Stories from people — real people living real lives — who’ve noticed a difference when they started paying attention to what their water actually is.

I’m genuinely excited about this. Not in the way I was excited about that Forbes mention, though that was fun and I’m not going to lie about it. In the way I get excited when I feel like something is true and I get to spend time inside it and share it with people who are also looking for something true.

Because that’s what this community has always been, underneath all the design changes and the platform migrations and the years that kept adding up while I kept typing away. It’s a bunch of people who want to live well, think clearly, treat themselves and the world around them with some genuine care, and maybe laugh a little along the way.

That hasn’t changed. I’ve just added water to the mix.

So here’s what I want to ask of you today, whether you’ve been reading this site since 1999 or you just stumbled in from somewhere and you’re still not entirely sure what this place is: stick around. Poke around the new Water Wellness section. Read the pieces under Sustainable Living and Environmental Positivity and see if anything resonates. Maybe something will surprise you the way that trip surprised me.

And if you’ve got a story — maybe a moment when the quality of something basic in your life shifted, and everything else quietly shifted with it — I genuinely want to hear it. That’s not a throwaway line at the bottom of a post. I mean it the same way I meant it in 1999 when I put my email address on every page of this site and then proceeded to answer every single message I got.

Some things don’t change.

Here’s to water. Here’s to clarity. Here’s to a better-life built on real foundations, one honest conversation at a time.

I’m so glad you’re here.

— The person still typing away in a room that now has a much nicer desk

Filed under: Positive Living, Water Wellness, Sustainable Living, Environmental Positivity | Tags: positivity, clean-water, mental-clarity, eco-positive, daily-wellness, natural-purity, mindful-growth, better-life