A few short years ago I was a very negative person. I had a rough start in life, and I suppose somewhere inside myself I thought that meant things would always be difficult. When you don’t know what good days are, you don’t live expecting them. You white-knuckle it through life, taking one day at a time and self-medicating any way you have to so you can see tomorrow.
Along the way, my mindset changed. A combination of good spiritual learning and positive people influenced me enough to have me question my own mental state and take inventory. I met people who had upbringings just as bad as my own (even worse in some ways), and yet they were still relatively happy every day. These people were Christian, but they didn’t ‘preach’ me to death. They didn’t say too much at all about it really, but they did something far more profoud – they lived in front of me. They lived a life that said ‘we may not have everything we want, but we’re still happy’. They lived a life that said ‘we’re healing from hurts we’ve been carrying around, but we’re happy’. They lived a life that said ‘we know how bad things are, but if we don’t try to do our best and change things while being positive, than we have lost our purpose anyways’.
Needless to say, these were not the stereotypical average Christians that make up the majority of that religion today. To see these people beside your passionless Sunday-morning churchgoer is a difference between night and day. They are not even the same species.
Anyways, what I am really aiming to say here is that what these people had – the peace, the confidence, and the positivity – I wanted it.
With prayer and insight, it came to my attention that the first thing I had to do was change my attitude. And to change my attitude, I first had to change my thoughts. Our thoughts are incredibly powerful things – they can make our break our day all on their own. You can wake up feeling refreshed and energetic, but then ten minutes later you can feel hopeless and depressed because of a memory. It was a struggle to break these habits and change these cycles. It’s like trying to re-wire your brain – you can remember things, or think of things, but you can’t let the reaction be the same anymore. You can’t let the emotions stay the same. So you have to change your entire perspective on the things you think about so the other variables change as well.
This is still something I am working on. I think that even when you get good at it, it will always take a bit of effort to maintain. But the results have been amazing. I haven’t ‘gone stupid’ or blinded myself to the realities behind me and before me, but I no longer allow them to steal from me. Peace is a free gift, and it is something I pursue relentlessly.
Two weeks ago I started getting rid of things that reminded me of negativity. I found that I had to dispose of a lot of music. Funny, but I don’t think people realize how strongly music ties in to memory. If you receive bad news or go through something traumatic, often times there is some sort of sound around you when it is happening. You may not consciously know it, but when you next hear that same sound/song again, you will remember that instance. Music may also remind you of people you’d rather not think too much about as well.
Music also ties in to emotions in a major way. If you go to a gym, what are you going to hear? Celine Dion ballads? No. You are going to usually hear something much heavier, a lot of guitar and aggression. Why? This music gets you ‘pumped up’. It gets the blood flowing, it taps into some determined rage, and that is a good motivator for pushing your body to keep going. If you go to a restaurant that has a licensed bar, you are going to hear more ‘classic rock and pop’ – why? Because most of the people who will buy drinks at a place like that rather than the newest nightclub grew up with 80’s music. It makes them feel younger and that in turn makes them feel happier, so they buy alcohol more freely. It’s all marketing and psychological manipulation really, but it does work.
So a lot of my old music is gone. Yes, goodbye angst-medicine. Goodbye needless rage triggers. Goodbye girly-music Laura likes so much…! (ok, not really, but I can always dream…).
It’s all good stuff.
So here’s to another good day! It’s a sunny Saturday morning, and I actually have the day off! I’ve made a pot of tea and I have a few Joyce Meyer episodes to catch up on ( http://www.joycemeyer.org/OurMinistries/Broadcast/ ), so for a few hours I’m going to set aside my responsibilities and the troubles looming on the horizons and just enjoy being alive.
I wish I’d figured out some of these simple thing sooner.
