nawinter.com

Think Happy Thoughts
– Go To Your Happy Place
– There’s No Place Like Home
– You’re Good Enough, Smart Enough, and Gosh Darn it, People Like You

In popular culture as in life, we are constantly admonished to think positively. A friend told me that his dad use to coach him to practice “positive self-talk” when playing sports. If memory serves me correctly (and the chances of that are slim), the purpose was to focus on playing well instead of dwelling on the mistakes that had been made. Good advice. So much so that it’s become a catch-phrase at work to help us get through some tough days.

The fact is all of the above is probably good advice. Thinking positively and focusing on the good things in life is a much better alternative than focusing on the negative. However, as recently reported by Business Week (scroll down), it actually might be better to not think positively. Not that the authors suggest that we should think negatively. Instead, recent research suggests that people are happier when they practice ambivalence; when they are content with the outcome because their expectations are reduced. Thinking positively means that you are looking for good things to come your way. Ambivalence means that you take life as it comes – and deal with the results. It may not qualify you for working at Disneyland, but it may make dealing with life outside of the happiest place on Earth a little easier.

Practicing ambivalence isn’t meant to be equated with a lack of care. Instead it means recognizing that just like good intentions, positive expectations have little actual impact. Heightened expectations means that you have a heighten awareness of when they are unfulfilled. Choosing to experience life rather than expecting something from it, might be the better way to go.

I like being happy.

This may seem like an obvious statement, but I’m convinced its not. Some people prefer misery. Whether they like the attention that comes with pity or they just find it easier to point out what they dislike, they choose, through their own volition, to dwell in the smut of life rather than flourishing in the richness of possibility. They choose to be discontent.

It really is easy to point out the things that we are missing. It’s easy to recognize what others have that we haven’t or to announce how life has cheated us out of what we believe we deserve. Sometimes, searching for the goodness that life offers is quite a chore. We look at our lives, and if we’re like most people on this Earth, it hasn’t exactly turned out the way we planned. It may be that our job’s not good enough, our spouse’s not good enough, or we don’t have either of the above. If its not one of those things, than for each of us there’s something that we wish were different, something that we wish made a little more sense or offered a little more respite.

But life rarely does turn out as we planned. Most of the time, if we’re honest, it turns out better. I’m convinced that God wants to pour down His blessings on His children and that most of the time when life’s hard, its the result of our own actions. But even when this is not the case, even when there are inexplicable mysteries of pain and suffering, we can still choose to be content. Because contentment is not dependent on what we have or what we are missing. Contentedness is dependent on trusting the One who has it all and in recognizing all the blessings that He’s given us despite what we deserve.