I had a discussion with a bunch of people last night about miracles and magic in our every day lives. I am not talking “Harry Potter” and “Hogwarts” style magic, I am talking every day stuff. My theory is that if you see and expect to see magic and wonders, you will. You will be open to all the wonderful and amazing things that happen your life every day – which can help you find a balance, and help you deal with the icky things when they happen in our lives. The beautiful and colorful spectacle of a sunrise, the glory of a flower in bloom, the wonder of water turning solid into ice, how in heck that big old piece of metal that is an airplane can actually fly. I suppose what I am proposing is very similar to “stop and smell the roses.”
Similarly I also believe that if you are only looking and preparing for the perception of “negative” things, you will just as easily find them. When I suggested the sunrise as a miracle to look for, the colors and the actual miracle that that body rises every day and provides for life on this planet, a friend said that all a sunrise meant to her was being blinded driving to work. When she said this you could see the pain and suffering that sunrise represented to her.
It brought to mind a quote from the Dali Lama. “Pain is inevitable, suffering is not.”
Dali Lama Quote
That quote always makes me think. How many times have I thoughtlessly suffered through something that in the big scheme of things was pretty trivial. Looking at it from my current perspective, I realize most of that was a waste of time. Rather than dwell on the “bad” part of the experience, I would have been better served to start working of the solution.
A change of mindset can make the difference in your life. As Shawn Achor says in this video, we can train our brains to look for the positive, which might sound unlikely, or even impossible, but consider how you got your negative out look.
You were, as a little kid, pretty happy go lucky, right? You weren’t worried and scared all the time, just some of the time. You learned these things. You learned how to be safe from parents, then the church and school, and the news media. Over time your outlook changed. You knew good things were still out there, but the worrisome things seemed bigger and more important and like something you should concentrate more of your energy on. That is, after all, why the media concentrates so often on negative news stories, making them seem bigger and badder than ever, because people, when alert, are better viewers. They act like they are helping educate us, but what they are doing is adjusting our blinders. They profit if all we can see is the bad because then we will want to watch them so that they can fill us in on all the big bad boogie-events out there. They could tell us about all the good, or, the reports of lowering of the crime rate, or all the places there is peace in the world. It just sells better if they are talking about politicians saying foolish things and people acting badly. The good is still out there.
I say reclaim your blinders. Adjust your own blinders so that you can see a balance, and can allow yourself to see the potential in every situation. Positive thinking doesn’t only mean crossing your fingers and hoping for the best – wishing for everything to be good, like magic. Positive thinking is in large part leaving yourself open for the positive, accepting the positive can happen, and allowing it to. Practice happiness, so that you can retrain your brain to be ready for it. Allow that life can be wonderful, and accept it and enjoy it when it is. Accept that things don’t always go right, but that things don’t always go wrong. As Mike Dooley of the TUT Adventurers Club says, “Thoughts become things, choose good ones.”
Saturday, March 24: 
