You! Yes, You! Listen to the ads, follow the articles, and believe the professionals. Your unhappiness and lack of success, culture concludes, is the direct result of your own lack of effort. You are the oil-rich ground beneath the feet of a third-world nation; you’re pre-stocked with all of the necessary materials and it’s only your incompetence or lazy lack of action that keeps you from conquering the universe. It takes you weeks to make that clever YouTube video and months or years to carve out the time to write your masterpiece, but see this successful person in our domain-hosting ad? Look at how fast she moves [from edit to edit]. She’s not impressive; this is literally the base amount of effort you should be putting into your life, and the only thing standing in your way from performing with this energy is an inexplicable insufficiency of drive (not lack of funds, connections or qualifications.)
… Being positive is hard. And honestly, suggesting positivity has become a miniature minefield on both sides of our sociopolitical dialogue.
Post-New-Age pro-emotive psycho-philosophers with handfuls and pocketfuls of degrees I’ll never possess postulate the unassailable necessity of sadness, anger, etc., deeply concerned by an anti-unhappiness culture that condemns the natural, constructive processes of negativity and shames children and youths into believing that states of sub-ideal emotion are undesirable and should be avoided instead of confronted. Sure, they have a point; there’s certainly an issue there.
Conversely, there’s a lot of resistance from the justifiably resentful demographic who feel as though the people preaching positivity are coming from a place of self-righteousness or, at the very least, a position of privilege that assumes the average person’s difficulties or is unsympathetic to the educational, economic, or genetic barriers preventing positivity from being “just that easy.”
These are both frequently posed criticisms of the “be positive” initiatives in our world, and they’re questions that temper the pressure of “successfully” achieving “happiness.” Happiness, as most of the great philosophers would agree, is not the goal. There are drugs for happiness, and happiness, many folks also seem to agree (even though it’s not objectively supported by science), can only properly exist when contrasted to its counterparts.
Regrettably, the conversation tends to fall off somewhere around this turn in the road. Maybe the vehicle veered on a patch too bumpy for most to traverse, but I don’t think that’s the case. The proposition is a harmless one: we should endeavor to be positive. Positivity is good. Why does anyone find that distasteful?
One person’s picture of being positive often isn’t the same as another’s. That’s one thing. Show a montage of “normal people” dancing and enjoying the freedom of their lives, but throw a same sex couple into the foreground, fill hands with alcohol or marijuana, or adorn the subjects in either expensive or provocative clothing (or red hats with white letters) and your depiction of levity is now an offensive illustration of alternative lifestyles to someone somewhere who for some reason or another thinks that people like you are exactly what’s wrong with this country.
They’re not wrong, either, you know. You are exactly what’s wrong with this country. You keep trying to sell people on something they don’t want: to change their minds.
I don’t mean that people *won’t* or *don’t* change their minds. I’m saying they don’t want to, and who does? Actively? We put enough effort into working out and eating healthier and being considerate friends and listening better and learning the politically correct vocabulary and forgiving people and paying our bills and not quitting our jobs. Changing our minds was never a popular pastime.
There’s an escalation recently, though. A particular trend toward defensiveness. We’ve gotten in the habit of conflating suggestion with criticism, criticism with judgment, and judgment with personal indictment. The aim of any assessment, even from the most hateful people, is to construct and reinforce – to strengthen. The most harmful, seemingly destructive voices (in most cases) are at least hoping to do good to their own positions and ways of life. And in the less extreme examples, toxic fandom (as its appropriately come to be known) lays siege to your opinion of Star Wars: The Last Jedi in a hope to improve their experiences with Star Wars in the future, even if they’re not using remotely effective skills of communication. When an angry mob tears down a neighborhood, its not because they only want to destroy; they aren’t concerned with how to rebuild and are reveling in that early step of development: cathartic deletion. We’ve grown defensive as we see and expect confrontations from any interaction of opposition. We even actively create confrontation as a preemptive response – the defense of an unprepared offense. I’m not entirely certain why we’re so defensive toward each other now. We’ve reached a point where managers and authority figures at a job can’t correct another worker’s performance without the underling becoming personally offended, and witnesses to this presumed slight will now instinctively take this victim’s side because “maybe you should have communicated it differently.” Maybe. The managers seem to be working on that, to arguable effect on the performance of those workers. Maybe there’s no concentration lately on how to receive criticism.
But none of that explains to me the defensiveness toward positivity. After all, what’s so distressing about being positive? To this, I have arrived at a few possibilities: its hard work, its often out of our control, and its embarrassing. The struggle to master our moods, like the endeavor of conquering our tongues or nailing our daily routine, never ends. We take classes, we form habits, we read books, we listen to special music, but the war is never won. From birth to death! And as hard as we work to achieve positivity – to reach that state of motivation and productivity that advertisers paint as so effortless with their jump-cut-equipped characters – something always comes along to knock our mood back down like Sisyphus watching the boulder tumble. A headache, a death, a bad day at work, a distracting headline in our news feed. We can’t avoid it. It’s humiliating, too, that something we’ve felt so naturally before should be so far from our reach so often or require so much labor to reclaim. Worse and more humbling is that we’re crippled without it.
Honestly, though, positivity in our lives is just hopeful neutrality. You don’t have to feel good, so long as you don’t feel bad and so long as you’ve peppered that neither-good-nor-bad state with a little will to choose something better. Maybe its the choice to try harder, to expect better from others, to see the glass as half full, or to just ask something more of ourselves in the plans we make.
Positivity is a daunting task. I think it helps to know that we have an advocate. Someone, who is bigger than all of this, is on your side. For me – and I’m not going to preach here so much as share with you – the advocate is Christ. Jesus wants me to succeed, to glorify his name, to have a life that illustrates his power and grace, and to be rebelliously joyful as often as I can. So I know that when I look for it, I will find his favoring wind behind me. Now, I posit confidently that favoring winds are not altogether hard to find. Be confident that something bigger than you has your back. It’s not a religious activity. It’s a faith based one. Not faith that you *can* find what you’re looking for, but that you *will.* It takes, as we’ve discussed, the cultivation of habits. Know the tricks that make you happy. For me, there are songs that I can’t resist like “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.” Practice being thankful, and that doesn’t mean attributing other people or God with the full responsibility for your successes. That’s false humility. I’m talking about being thankful for the little things. This Pollyanna level stuff. Be thankful for smooth traffic, for a low price, for clean clothes, for looking good in the mirror, for hearing a song you like on the radio or over the speakers as you enter a store. Take these moments to say “I might be having a good day,” and then be thankful to your favoring wind. You’ll learn to see feel that wind more and more, how to differential one wind from another, and how to catch the favoring one in your sails.
We can agree that there’s nothing wrong with being sad or being angry, being tired or being slow, but what we all want is to be masters of the wind.
To leave you with, cheerfully empowered:
“For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.” – Isaiah 43:19 NLT
The Favoring Wind 