It is far to common for us to think of things from a dualistic point of view. Situations are either good or bad, people are kind or mean, food is tasty or terrible, we are either rich or poor, we’re either having fun or bored, our ‘inner circle’ of friends seem to either love us or show indiference.
It actually makes sense that this is the way we classify the experiences in our lives. Our lives are driven by our pursuit of pleasure or avoidance of pain. Physically….our bodies are built with near perfect symmetry. In sports, you either win or lose. Throughout our daily experience this is reinforced.
Whether we like it or not our minds are constantly judging and classifying things as ‘black and white’. I think we owe it to ourselves to not fall into this trap. When we file away experienceslike this we cut ourselves off learning or salvaging positivity from the ‘bad’ things and also falsely attribute pleasure only to experiences that either directly meet or exceed our expectations or those of popular culture.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to catch myself during these moments, and forcing a more neutral point of view. I’ve focused on the situations where my brain has tried to log things as ‘bad’ (after all…I don’t have a problem with feeling good!). What I’ve noticed is that when I’ve made a conscious decision to change my point of view….either the situation changes (in ways I could never have predicted)….or the experience just becomes less significant in my mind after the fact. Most of the time the former occurs, with a potentially negative experience transforming into something much more positive. In the past week that I’ve been paying attention this the number of these random coincidences has increased like crazy. It is like the moment I stop judging a situation, it actually changes to my benefit!
I wrote in another post about the importance of not stickin too close to your own expectations…..in the same vein….I think we need to change the way we file things away in our minds to really be emotionally strong and live an outstanding life. Try it for a week and you will see what I mean.
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