Challenging Negativity

Seeing in 2009

Challenging negativity can take many forms. Just over a decade ago I saw in the New Year in a yurt in some woods in Gloucestershire. It was a great party. People danced, drank, smoked and had far out conversations. One conversation has stuck with me all this time. I want to examine it this evening as it seems poignant now.

The chap who owned the land on which the woods happened to be was a particularly melancholy fellow. Away from the sound-system, we sat at the edge of the yurt and exchanged differing viewpoints over what was going down on planet earth at the time. I talked to him at length about the reasons to be cheerful despite the then recent financial crisis.

We discussed the looming global recession which was threatening jobs and the economy. He was having none of my good will and insisted that we were like two Romans witnessing the fall of the Roman Empire. That societal collapse was imminent. That everything would fall apart in the next few years.

Challenging Negativity

I decided to try a different approach because I refused to be taken in by his negativity. I suggested that even if the breakdown of everything orderly and good was near and inevitable, then we would have been in the privileged position of having seen the peak and the aftermath. Those who made it through the chaos of his ‘collapse’ (whatever that manifested as) would be able to bring about better ways of living.

The guy was a natural cynic. His position was that the world was overpopulated – people were greedy and self-centred and were getting what was coming to them. At this point, it was getting colder and I was growing bored of his stubbornness. I was still certain that pessimism was never going to be the solution to anyone’s problems.

In the end he chose not to concede much. He wished to preserve his prism of negativity despite the obvious calling to look on the bright side of things. After forty minutes overall or maybe even an hour I escaped from the tangles of the conversation. I danced, I drank, and generally got on with making merry nearer the warmth of the central stove beneath the yurt’s rudimentary chimney.

The benefits of displeasure

If you know what the best of something looks like, and you are in a position to actively work towards it, then experiencing a downward trend can be an asset. Displeasure with what has occurred in the past can be a powerful motivation but need not be definitive. There is a Zen saying we cannot stop each day passing whether we participate in it or not.

In the same vein, everything passes, seasons pass, bad spells pass, emotions, thoughts and moods all pass. Living life as a human is fantastically complicated. We endlessly try to simplify it because we have to in order to make sense of the world around us. One way of simplifying all that is going on is to use past experience.

We tend to see ourselves as (among over things) a physical embodiment of past events. We make predictions about the present moment and future moments based on the trajectory of our past timelines. The woodsman I had chatted to at the party was stuck with negative feelings about his own past and projected them everywhere.

Stoic Wisdom

The last of the five good emperors Marcus Aurelius contributed many insightful philosophical musings to the world. One such idea goes along the lines of saying very little is needed to make a happy life, it is all in your way of thinking. I couldn’t agree more. Much later in time, Shakespeare’s Hamlet claims there is ‘nothing either good or bad, thinking makes it so’.

As everything is passing endlessly from the present moment, it is easy to see how we come to view ourselves as constituted by things that happened in the past. There is a more definite sense to the past events, since they are fixed in time. Yet, we can find ways here of challenging negativity.

The events of the past are just as transitional as the present we live through. History is written by the winners as much as people who refuse to be defined by past events are more likely to overcome them in their futures. As we all live our subjective lives, everything is open to interpretation.

Foreboding Times

There appears to me a collective sense of gloom as we approach the winter here in the UK. This is usual but exacerbated by the fact that none of us know what the festive season will look like. There is a great deal of uncertainty. On top of that there is the issue of Brexit and scaremongering media headlines about the potential problems.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t be displeased with everything fun being cancelled this year. I am contending that life is what we make it. If you make your own luck in life, then you must make your own misfortune too. It’s a very human feature to take credit for successes and at the same time blame failings on circumstance. In the next six months we may all have a lot of time for introspection and it’s important that we balance our worldviews.

Awareness of our patterns of thinking is going to be crucial as we all aim to stay fit and healthy and look after our mental health. Challenging times bring with them opportunities to grow and adapt. So it seems wise to look upon what is coming ahead as a time to improve our thought processes.

Final thoughts

My miserable party acquaintance back at the start of 2009 may never have been relieved that society didn’t end that year. I have no doubt that his outlook on life would always keep him focused on the next societal threat. Without some kind of revelation I imagine that his negative way of thinking continues to shape his outlook to this day.

There is a better year on the horizon, the cynics can be silenced and we can all hopefully exercise enough mental discipline to see each other safely to the other side.