Finding The Positive

It's easy to lose yourself in the negative, isn't it?

Ever noticed how bad news travels like wildfire, whilst good news seems by comparison to only be given a passing mention? How about times when we solve a nagging problem only to almost immediately move on to the next, without acknowledging and celebrating our success in coming to a solution? We're always thinking things like 'one less thing to worry about', as if worrying is some sort of essential skill, as if we need to worry, but rarely do we just stop and give ourselves a pat on the back. And how often, when asked that everyday question 'how are you' do we prefer to say 'not bad' rather than 'good'? Think about it..

It's almost as if we are averse to being positive..

Compare how much time and energy we humans spend on negative emotions and feelings, focusing on bad news and allowing problems to dominate our thinking, with the amount of time we contemplate and enjoy and celebrate the good in our lives - you'll almost invariably find that we seem dominated by negativity. We might think we are very positive people, and even find that others think of us as such, yet actually be just as wracked with internal doubts, consumed by fear and focused on negativity as the next person.

I write more on the subject of personal / emotional / spiritual growth - specifically on how we must learn to accept and deal with problems and pain in life, and live a genuine existence based on truth and reality - than anything else. I have touched on human nature before, that is, the features of our behaviour and thinking that are innate. I find myself questioning to what degree our tendency towards negative thinking is a part of human nature, and how much is in fact learned behaviour.

Here's a thought experiment.. what if you woke up one day with a blank slate in your mind. You're physically as you are now and mentally at the same stage of development, but with no memories, no preconceptions or presumptions, no biases etc. You are equipped with enough knowledge and reasoning to be able to function and understand yourself and the world, without any of the emotional and psychological baggage accumulated from the sum total of your past personal experience. What would you think of your life, humanity and the state of the world after one day? After one week? Can you imagine?!

Let's forget the obvious scientific flaws in this experiment and take it on face value. I would wager that in pretty short order you would be very confused and overwhelmed. With no emotional baggage to shape your thinking you wouldn't have a flawed and faulty perception of the world, preconceived ideas about how people and things operate, or presumptions about the nature and capabilities of other people or yourself - but you would have no memories of past events or how you dealt with them, no experience of your interactions with the world and other people and no knowledge of the processes involved in encountering and dealing with the problems and pain you have encountered.

My point is that human nature only accounts for a small fraction of why we think the way we do about ourselves, others and the world at large. The vast majority of our ideas about who we are, about other people and about how the world works are formed from our learned experience of life. How we are raised as children plays a large part in how we grow up to see ourselves (and others) as adults. The influences of our education system and exposure to the mass media and culture of our society affects how we think about our interactions with other people and the world in general.

By the end of adolescence most of us have formed a picture of our lives and even our 'place' in the world, based on what is basically a pretty narrow range of experiences. We certainly do not learn to accept problems and pain as a normal part of life, nor are we taught that hard work and legitimate suffering is essential in order to truly deal with our difficulties. We do not learn to form a real understanding of the suffering of others in the world either, nor do we start adulthood with anything like a balanced view of what it is to really live life well. These massively important lessons in life are not taught to us, nor marketed or advertised as desirable. As a result, one actually has to seek out the learning of these essential life skills, and this is compounded by the fact that we don't even know we need to look.

As I eluded to in my previous post about our pain-avoiding culture, we are force-fed images of perfection every day, told fairy-tales of living 'happily ever after' from a very young age, and offered quick-fix solutions to any and every kind of pain imaginable. Society, our culture, the mass media - all conspire to reinforce a picture of life and 'how we should be living' that is so far from the actual truth of our daily struggles that it is hardly surprising that we tend to see every negative thing down the track. This false, unbalanced, hyper-rosey reality gets its claws into us from day one. No wonder we see so much negativity in our lives, and fail to appreciate the truly positive.

By avoiding pain at all costs; seeing problems as purely negative things to be simply batted away without doing the work of learning the inherent lessons within, failing to strive for a genuine existence by discarding the lies we are told and the fake ideas about life we are subjected to, and not fully appreciating each and every positive that comes along, we are all doing ourselves the greatest disservice - long term we actually end up living a life of pointless, needless, unnecessary suffering. As age and bitter experience catch up with us, we eventually find ourselves realising we've been lost in negativity all along..



Copyright ©2018 Richard C. Greenlow. All rights reserved.