“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ~ Anais Nin
For the next day or so, tune in to the things you say and to what you hear from those around you. Listen closely.
Is what you hear negative and miserable? Is it hateful? Full of fear and condemnation? Or are you hearing words of encouragement, hope and positivity? When there is a legitimate reason to complain, is it balanced with kindness and compassion, or is it infused with blame and anger and a pitiful victim mentality?
I’ve struggled these past few months to maintain a positive attitude about anything and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Was it me? My job? My house? My age? Life in general?
Should I move? Hibernate? Go on an extended “eat, pray, love” style journey? Get a new identity and run away from home?
In the middle of a conversation a light bulb came on. The person I was talking to is tired of living here, ready to move on, frustrated, bored, and every little thing is an irritant. They’ve got a case of “short-timer syndrome,” which is really the adult version of a high schooler’s senioritis. Their attitude and energy was quietly infecting mine, but I didn’t realize it. Within minutes, all that negativity I’d been packing around lifted, because it wasn’t mine.
When all we are saying is “bad, bad, bad,” it says more about who we are than what’s true. If we constantly declare that the country/state/county/town we live in is going to hell in a handbasket, and the place we work is full of cheats and crooks and frauds, and our own family is out to get us, and there’s something wrong with everyone else but nothing’s wrong with us, the real source of the problem is probably staring soullessly back at us in the mirror.
A few weeks ago I stopped to pick up the mail on the way to the office. Upon opening the door I was blasted by a wave of “eau de skunk.” Someone who had apparently been skunked had come into the building an hour or so earlier. I caught whiffs of that smell all day, as if I was the one who’d been sprayed, even though I’d just been in the same atmosphere for a few minutes.
Bad attitudes, particularly when they’re proclaimed out loud, and especially when they come from people we respect, care about, or who are in positions of leadership, are a lot like that skunky smell. They rub off on us, and the next thing we know we’re sniffing around wondering why everything around us stinks. (If you are of the aforementioned non-self-aware type, you’ll just start pointing fingers at everyone else and never realize you’re the source of the odor.)
The next time you hear someone’s unhinged rant about what a terrible country this is, or how horrible Colorado is because of whichever fill-in-the-blank reason is trending this week, or how wretched this or that or the other thing is, remember: they see things as they themselves are, not as things actually are. Their words are merely a reflection of their own condition, poor things. That’s a miserable way to live. The good news? We can choose our own attitude! As a politely paraphrased version of a quote by author William Gibson goes: Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by ‘unhappy souls.’
