This was originally meant for yesterday, but the election cancelled it out. There are some similarities. Sorry not sorry.
Why do you choose to look at the positive?
This is another one of the questions I’ve referenced in the last few days, but it is also one I get a lot. I’ve had people accuse me of ignoring reality, of being oblivious, and of having a life that must be too easy because that’s the only way someone could have such a “dumbass attitude” about things.
Maybe these are all true.
As far as my conscious reasons for it, I look at the positive because I lived in the negative for many years and it got me nowhere.
I saw the bad in everything and everyone, including myself, and it made the world seem very dark and hopeless. I got what I expected. Every. Single. Day.
So, I look at the positive because whatever we dedicate our attention to is what we get.
Here’s the important thing: I didn’t start looking at the positive once my life turned around, my life turned around because I focused my attention on the positive.
I don’t care if you want to call it The Law of Attraction or The Secret or P.M.A. or Naming and Claiming or you want to go the logical route and call it Common Sense, but wherever your attention rests most often is what is going to dominate your thinking. What dominates our thinking becomes our life.
I look at the positive because my work pulls me in the other direction, and people need me to be clear and coherent and to offer an alternative to the narrative they are living in. My work would probably drag me down pretty quickly without it.
More than anything though, I focus on the positive because it is most closely aligned with reality.
As I’ve blogged about an a few occasions, when we count everything that goes right each day, we quickly see that it far outweighs the wrong. It goes beyond this too: a vast, vast majority of everything that happens, happens without any conscious input or action from us, and everything is still going well. Birds fly and the sun rises and it rains and air is breathable and the planets stay where they are supposed to and the sun makes plants grow and the earth spins the way it is supposed to and gravity works and all of that stuff. And none of us have a single thing to do with it. That’s kind of cool.
So, I focus on the positive because it is beneficial and because it is real.
We have a cognitive bias toward the negative or harmful, and I choose to remain aware that this is a bias and little more.
It works for me.
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