Life on earth is too short to spend it with negative events, places and even negative people. Many of us work hard at maintaining an optimistic view of life; it is very much like maintaining oneself physically and spiritually. We have to nourish both in order to maintain a healthy being. Optimism, as well, has to be fed and maintained. We feed optimism by surrounding ourselves as much as possible with positive people and events in our environment.
I remember, even today, a song from my youth that I heard while watching one of the first animated movies in the 1940’s. It went something like this; “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch onto the affirmative and don’t mess with Mr. In-between.” It had a very catchy tune and I remember singing or humming it (when I was alone) over and over again, when I was old enough to understand what it was really saying. It had a positive effect on me and how I view things.
One could argue that there are a lot of things in life to be pessimistic about, because bad things happen to all people. The public media has a tendency to report a preponderance of negative events and very little on the positive side. Everyday many good things happen in our society that are uplifting and that would feed our optimism and we have to seek these things. Allowing one’s attitude to be directed only by what we hear from the media or from negative people is bound to effect us in a negative way. Pessimists are born every day just from what they hear on the TV or the radio. We have to temper what we hear by thinking about all the good and positive things around us. There is a scripture that says, “Many are called but few are chosen.” I have always interpreted that to mean we are the ones who choose because we have agency. We choose how we view the news and how we view our environment. We also choose how we behave in relation to that view. About two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius said, “If you are distressed by anything internal, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to the view you have of that thing. How you view anything is a power you can revoke at any moment.”
There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic, and research has shown that optimistic people are happier and healthier than pessimists. That alone should be incentive enough to start feeding on optimistic bones every day while accentuating the positive.