Positive Thinking

Reader mitchellporter asked me to talk about positive thinking, and I’m happy to do so because I’ve been pondering the issue a lot recently.

Nothing in life is as much under our control as our inner world. It’s not completely under our control, of course. If you have a splitting headache or stomach cramps, your inner world will be grim. Also, the building blocks for our inner world come from the outside. You can’t have the subjectivity of a 16th-century peasant. Or of a person who grew up in a large household if you are an only child. Or of a native speaker of Japanese if you don’t know a word of the language. But you can build all sorts of edifices with the building blocks you got handed out at birth. Or, rather, at conception because your subjectivity begins to form from that instance.

There’s quite a lot of creative freedom in how you arrange your inner building blocks and how you re-arrange and chisel them throughout life.

Life is the story we tell ourselves and others about it. Any experience you have is yours to arrange into a story. Tragic or happy, bereavement or success, it’s all about how you tell it to yourself. Positive thinking is a way of re-orienting yourself from the story of how you are a victim, a loser, a miserable person and nothing ever goes your way into a story of how you are a winner. You can feel like one in the midst of the harshest situations because how you feel is up to you.

I suspect, for example, that I might not be just as beautiful as I feel. But so what? Compared to half a century of feeling movie-star gorgeous, what does it really matter? I could have spent this time, decades really, shrinking like a snail over my Yeti hair, visible stomach, and a weirdly shaped head (thanks, mom, for believing the old woman tale that newborns need their heads molded manually). All of that energy that I could have poured into squirming over my imperfections, went to other things.

I have a friend who was recently diagnosed with stage-four cancer. She’s luminous. Her life is full and amazing. And of course, it took a lot of work. She went to a monastery to get direction from a monk. She worked on it like a plantation slave but she recovered her peace of mind. She found her purpose in being there for other people, works of charity, prayer, and study of the lives of Orthodox saints. If anybody has an excuse to feel miserable, it’s this woman. But she’s the happiest person I know. And again, easy it wasn’t. But the effort is worth the prize which is a well-ordered, radiant inner life.

Let’s all do the following exercise. Let’s take one story from our lives when something bad happened to us and retell it as something positive. And then repeat the story to ourselves until it becomes one of our inner building blocks.