If I could go back and give my younger self some advice, this would be it.
I wholeheartedly believe that no matter what deep insight or wisdom we desperately seek in our life, we won’t heed it—even if it smacks us on the nose—until we are truly ready to receive it.
Maybe it was my time, and maybe I was finally ready, but the very idea of overwhelming the negative by increasing the positive stopped me in my tracks.
I will admit, it defied my comprehension for a good while, immediately followed by two alternating thoughts; “Are we allowed to do that?”, and total, disbelieving resistance.
Only then did I become aware of how deeply entrenched my beliefs were of the dominance of the negative, of the villain killing it at every move while the hero got points for “good effort”.
Whether it’s the way we’re wired or what we’ve been taught forever, a lot of us have come to believe that the only way for positive to exist and legitimately be acknowledged and enjoyed is when it has completely eradicated the negative.
A tad unrealistic, wouldn’t you agree?
In our daily thoughts, this distills down to I’ll be happy when xyz happens, or I’ll be a success when I get/do/become . . . , etc. etc. Because there’s a lot of etceteras in our heads.
I’m willing to bet this happens more often that we’ll admit.
It’s an indisputable fact of life that the negative, or what we perceive to be so, never fails to make an appearance.
And yet, it is so easy to get stuck, paralyzed, crumble or be ready to give up when things get uncomfortable. One way or another, we obsess about what went wrong, what we lack, what we did or didn’t do. And often, we live there.
We let the negative overwhelm us.
For most of my life I thought that gratitude was one of those nice-to-do things that I would do when I became a better person or when I had more time or some other excuse, when what I was really thinking was that I would be (could be) more grateful when I solved all my problems.
We can be so naive, can’t we? I almost want to laugh at my younger self, not with mockery but with knowing kindness.
My best understanding, if I can call it that, is that gratitude is a necessary practice for us to not let the positive go unacknowledged and under-appreciated; it is to give what’s going right its rightful due when we’re too busy stacking up what’s going wrong; it’s to acknowledge that as much as we don’t want to be in the situation we might be in and it feels like the villain keeps winning, that said villain is complex and layered and is forcing us to open and learn what we desperately need to learn so we can grow and be better and live more meaningfully and deeply.
So yes, gratitude may be the best place to start for giving the positive its place on the stage, no matter how small. But it’s by no means the only way to overwhelm the negative.
You can be intentional about seeking or deepening more connection in your life.
You can be mindful of what words you speak to yourself; choose what lifts you up, or at least choose words that don’t constantly hold a knife to your neck.
You can engage in acts of kindness and service to others.
You can make efforts to dry up the toxic energy streams in your life, like bad habits, poor boundaries, denial or avoidance of truths you need to face.
You can do these or many, many more things that help you move from being overwhelmed by the negative to overwhelming the negative by increasing the positive.
This idea no longer defies my comprehension. Instead, I wonder where it has been all my life. But . . . it is here now, and for that I am truly grateful.
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