Put a little light on it
'Think positively. Be positive.' What’s that mean? What’s positive? What’s not? To start with, to think positive there has to be the concept of a negative. You can’t have a positive without its dark side, the negative. So what is negative? And are these absolute values where if you call it a positive or a negative just once will it always be so, in any circumstance? Then faced with this Either / Or situation, can you take a negative and turn it into a positive by thinking its opposite?
To think positive there has to be an acceptance of a negative. Simply to 'think' positive is useless, in fact worse than useless, it’s self-deluding because, for the appearance of a short-term gain, it will only exacerbate the problem in the long run by giving the illusion of change when the nature of the problem has not been identified let alone addressed. Of course changing a negative quality by the cultivation of a positive quality can be done, but only if the nature of the negative has been identified in some way and then properly addressed.
This may not be so easy as it sounds. To begin with there can be a real reluctance for us to be willing to go there, to actively turn and look into what we would rather not know about too deeply. And even if willing, when facing up to it, it may not go the way we want or expect. So wouldn’t it be much easier to let these things hide out, slide by, lurk at one remove, so we can continue to convince ourselves of what we’d prefer to believe?
Yet at the same time there we are still searching for this elusive positive, which, when it comes down to it, will also continue to hold its distance in exactly the same proportion as the negative we have not yet acknowledged. Or, alternatively, we can decide, turn, and go directly and look into our own negative… and take a walk on the dark side.
