See the good

The other day I was invited to an event at the local middle school. The start of the event was a State of the Schools speech by the superintendent. He outlined the process his leadership goes through to determine the goals and future direction for the entire district.

When he finished, he played videos by several of the clubs and groups at the schools. They spanned several elementary schools, the middle school, and the high school. The clubs were described, and students were interviewed to provide their perspective.

For many of the students, these extra activities were life changing. They received so much from the efforts of the staff and fellow students working with these teams. The warm feelings from watching these videos made me realize how much we tend to ignore positive things in our life and favor the negative.

Most of us spend our time watching the news broadcast of some horrible event halfway across the world versus seeing these local people doing what they can to provide help and support for those close to us. I know I fall victim to this.

Being at this event helped me realize how much I ignore when it is positive. These clubs are not going to be news-worthy. If they were on the news the ratings for that segment would dip.

But show information on a natural disaster somewhere and we are all glued to the TV. Sure, we want to be informed but it goes beyond that. We get sucked into these horrible tragedies and it starts to color the world.

In my opinion, COVID progressed this negative perspective. Because we needed to check in with news outlets to know what rules we had to follow, it enhanced this negative habit. Add in the fact that the political parties in the US saw this as a way to push their agenda, and suddenly you had content that drew you in and stirred negative emotion.

It wasn’t that COVID started this, but it magnified it. If we aren’t careful, we can easily be pulled into a view of the world that says everything is terrible and nothing is positive.

The world is what you make of it. There is negative AND positive in the world so you can choose how information forms your attitude. But if we don’t actively push towards the positive, the negative will win out.

We are all drawn to the negative. It catches our attention and causes us to form opinions. It pushes us into a frustrating world that will seep into our attitudes and beliefs.

But if we choose to turn the volume down on those negative aspects and turn the volume up on the positive things in life we can shift into a content and happy mindset. For me, doing this gives me energy. I notice when I am falling too far into the negative. It saps my energy and I feel grumpy. Every inconvenience turns into another reason to scowl at the world and get upset with others.

When I turn the volume down on those and turn it up by finding the positives, I feel a great surge of energy and want to do more to push towards my goals and to help those around me.

The point is that this is all a choice. We all choose how we see the world around us. Is it filled with evil? Is it a dark place that we all have to suffer through? Or is it a place that has its atrocities but has plenty of beauty as well? I love the lyrics from Jimmy Buffett’s He Went To Paris where he says, “Some of it’s magic, and some of it’s tragic, but I had a good life all the way.”