Power of Positivity ??

Going to disagree with this quote. My own experiences are that life is better when you can look for and find the good. But there are things that happen to you that just suck. And there are events in the world where is there literally no good to be found.

Negative things and negative emotions are just a part of life. Stuff happens. I think trying to paper over the bad things with a false front of optimism isn’t the best idea. You have to give yourself the time to process and deal with the negative energy. The problem is when you allow that negative energy to swallow you and you lose the ability to find the good in anything which is just as bad because there is good in a lot of things. Just not everything.

In my dance life, I’m a textbook case of overthinking and it is something I do work on because I know it is a limiting factor. If you choose to focus only on all the things that went wrong (or could go wrong), then you miss out on all the things that went right. Not to say you should ignore the stuff that went wrong because that’s the path to growth and improvement but you shouldn’t spend all your energy there.

The part about keeping your mind off things that don’t help you is interesting. If we all did that, then something like Twitter wouldn’t exist because there is very little there that helps. Most of it is just angry people shouting at other angry people. None of that is productive or ever moves us closer to dealing with the things they are angry about. But it is easier to complain than to fix something.

I like this one although I’m certainly guilty of not following it. If you’ve been here for a bit, you know I’m not winter’s biggest fan. The only way to change that is to move to someplace where there is less of it but I’m not ready to do that. So I’ve tried to soften my approach a bit and focus on winter survival. There is beauty there and finding ways to appreciate it while also looking for the changes that signal spring is on the way. Probably never going to fully embrace winter but it is useful to try and find a healthier way to deal with it.

Although I think this sometimes that trying to change the way you think about something leads you to stay in bad situations. Towards the end of my work life, my job had become super stressful. You could feel the end was near and I had to go in and try to keep people motivated when there really wasn’t anything to be motivated about. So I tried to focus on the things I enjoyed (the people) and thought I could hold on until I hit my magic number for early retirement. Never knew how much stress I was under until I got the notice about my department being eliminated. You’d be shocked how relieved you can feel about losing your job.

I think this sums it up for me. There are clear benefits to looking at the optimistic side of life. Better to be the “half full” person. I have no doubts about that. But it doesn’t mean you should attempt to block out or avoid the bad stuff. Because you really can’t filter everything. You have to take off the rose colored glasses from time to time and acknowledge the suck.

Like everything, it is about balance but you want the scale to tilt more towards the optimistic side. Life is more fun that way.