Knowing the weather is an important part of our day. It may be cold. It may be humid. It may be dry. We are constantly aware of the seasonal shifts as they come because we have to immediately respond to them.
But very little time is spent thinking of the climate. How is the overall weather changing? What’s staying consistent across a wide range of time? We can often draw very different conclusions when focusing on the climate.
We often do a very similar thing in our lives. Maybe we describe our day or even our week as being difficult and gloomy. And the next week might be great and splendid.
We jump between these states of life just as the weather changes between the days. And it gets easy and simple to declare these events as positive or negative experiences
But can they really be? Maybe we end up being stuck in a long line for a while. But then we’ll see an old friend that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Was waiting in line a good or bad thing? Maybe we fail at a large personal goal of ours. But we try something new from that which becomes an important part of our life. Was the failure truly a negative aspect of our life?
The Endless Loop
There’s an old story that makes this clearer. There are many variants of it, but the most recent one I’ve heard about is as part of a Chinese Proverb. In it, there’s a young man who is born with amazing horse riding skills. And everyone in the village can’t stop telling him how lucky he is. And the man just responds, “maybe.” Then one day, he falls off a horse and breaks his leg, ending his career. Then everyone in the village talks about how unlucky he is. Again he responds, “maybe.” After that, the army shows up to recruit young men. And the man wasn’t taken because of his broken leg. Now everyone in the village tells him he’s so lucky. One more time he just says, “maybe.”
Most people have a view of life akin to the villagers. They notice what they perceive to be good or bad things in the moment and respond to them as such. They similarly make these judgements about other people’s lives too. They’re limited to the changing patterns of the now and infer from there.
But the man has a larger perspective. He realizes that determining something as good or bad now is meaningless. Because it always is the cause for some other event, which leads to another event, which leads to something else. There’s a cycle of experience that in it of itself is neither good nor bad. But when you focus on just small aspects of it, we tend to view it as such.
Learning to see like the man provides a radically new view of life. It’s no longer about judging what is going on each day. We simply walk through life for what it is.
After all, who are we to know what is actually good and bad for us? All we know is what we would like to have happen. Who wants to be in a long line? Who wants to fail on personal projects? None of it seems appealing. And yet, magical things can come from undesired occurrences. And it can shift our initial idea of whether the previous event was really good and bad.
We can never know if an experience is wholly positive and negative. So why bother trying?
Positivity Vs Optimism
There’s something I want to make clear. I’m not here to sell you on the fact that you need to view everything through this magical positive lens and that it’s all rainbows and sunshine.
It isn’t.
There are still things that can bring down our mood. There are things we prefer not to happen. The idea of “thinking positive” doesn’t apply when all we see is an empty glass. So how do we respond to those situations?
Think optimistic.
You might be thinking that’s a bit anticlimactic. It doesn’t sound like any better advice. But hear me out.
To me, optimism is about seeing that empty glass, and being confident that you can find a way to fill it up. It’s being down, but believing you’ll find a way to get back up. It’s when the world is seemingly against you and having faith things will get better.
Positivity is difficult. But optimism is a choice. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in life. You can always have the perspective that it will go uphill eventually. And the thing is, they just might. Because we really don’t know how life unfolds. We don’t know how the negatives turn into positives. But we do have the decision to be optimistic about the process. And I think we’d be all the better for it.
We don’t have the perspective to understand the movements of life. It’s too chaotic and unexpected. But we certainly shouldn’t pretend to understand the order enough to say things are good and bad. What really matters is that the present is happening. And we have to decide where to go from now, no matter what’s going on around us.
Labeling our life events by positive and negative is easy, just like looking at the weather. But understanding that it all creates a greater picture is different. We don’t have to make sense of what’s going on. We just have to live our best now for what could be possible tomorrow.
