Thinking Thoughts

Thinking positive has been a difficult step for me. People have often called me a pessimist or a cynic in my life and I've fought to change that part of myself in the last few years.

I've come to a point where on the whole, I am extremely happy. Life is grand, I'm pursuing the things I want and love in life, and I have much to look forward to it. I thank God daily for his blessings, and it is a great improvement over my life a few years back. It's not like I was depressed or doing terrible, but I guess you could say I was stuck in a rut. Perhaps you'd be even kinder and say they were "formative years," for they did force me to become a new sort of person. Don't worry, I'm still me.

So recently I've been thinking about the movie, "the Secret," a film of questionable ideas, which I find quite intriguing. It's a film akin to "What the *bleep* do we know?" and it talks about the Law of Attraction. It claims that the things that happen to us in life are the result of our thoughts, the ideas and images we are holding in our minds attract like situations/objects into our paths. I'd like to avoid the self-centered focus on material goods which this video portrays and turn attention back to the basic principle it portrays. I look at my life in the last three years and I immediately notice that I like my life much more, good things are happening to me and life goes in a basically better pattern than it did before. Since I started thinking positive, I've changed a lot and so have the things that have happened to me. I'd say that's a start worth noticing. So in short, I'd have to lean toward agreement with the movie and believe that our thoughts really do have some impact on the reality around us. I'm not going to argue how much or how it works other than to say that to some significant extent, it does work.

This brings me to my biggest concern, the biggest roadblock I am finding in life. The movie mentions how negative reactions tend to cycle. People at work complain about the same problems and they only get worse. Your friends are always sick or always struggling with money or always having trouble with relationships and it always seems to be the same old story. The movie claims that it's in large part because of their continual thought pattern on negative occurances that negative occurances continue to happen.

I've been thinking about this a lot, because I'm the kind of person that has a hard time letting go. If I'm in an argument, my stubborn mind continues to mull over all the details of the argument over and over inside long after debate is through. If something negative occurs it is easy to continue thinking about it. You want to go to your friends and tell them all about your bad day. In some cases it feels to me like a release. Talking about it seems to help sometimes, because I can get the matter off my chest, hopefully find some support, feel justified in my bad reaction and go on with my day. If I don't find support I continue to mull. Maybe not all of you are remotely like me. I've always been stubborn, so maybe it's a little bit a part of my personality. But maybe it's just a bad habit that has not been dealt with and continued to grow. The point is, I find it difficult to let go, to let those negative occurances slip by and leave them behind me in a matter of minutes. I'd very much like to, I've very much tried to, and I still very much think it is possible. Still, it is my biggest roadblock, and I see it ruining my days. One bad thing happens to ruin my mood, one false word maybe, and I'm thinking about it the whole day, and then later that day, I'm given something else to think about, and then I'm in a bad mood for a week, and it's tough to get back to the thankful, positive, hopeful, joyful person I've been trying to be these past few years.

Maybe a lot of my thoughts are just nonsense, but whether you buy into the whole load of whathaveyou about quantam physics and the power of the mind, I know that many people understand to some extent what I'm talking about. With the exception of my dad and a few other weirdos out there, most people seem struggle with the negativity that is all around them in this life. Maybe I just need a little extra sleep. maybe I'm a little too busy. Maybe this or that or the other thing.

But then I think, are we really supposed to be happy all the time? Lots of people, wise people even, I'm sure would say no. We can't be, they'd say. Sadness is a part of life as much as happiness, pain as much as ease, toil as much as rest. But that's not how life was meant to be, I'd say. Maybe, just maybe, that's not the way it's supposed to be. Maybe we're supposed to be happy, but we're not always because we don't believe we can. We live our lives with so many assumptions, how can we tell reality from perspective, especially if there isn't really a difference.

I confess, now I'm confused. If you've got an open mind, but a careful one, see "the Secret." I'd like to know what other people think about it.