Playlist
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) I’ve never bought into the argument that negative thinking is inherently bad and that the solution is to smother it with cheery, positive thoughts.
Don’t get me wrong, |NAME|: optimism, confidence and sense of agency are powerful and necessary.
But understand their true nature. They are assets, not a cure.
Thoughts are narrative: it’s how we make sense of events in our lives. And just like a story, you can’t tell yours without having both highs and lows.
Think of your personal story narrative as a musical playlist (or a 1986-vintage mixed tape if you’re middle-aged like me). On it, you have a blend of upbeat and bittersweet songs. Maybe some goth or post-punk (again, if you remember the 80s the way I do…but I digress).
Each track is necessary. Each strikes a familiar feeling.
The problem isn’t that the playlist exists.
The problem starts when we retreat into that playlist and allow how we feel about events of the past to inform our present and shape the future.
When you do that, you trigger a series of profoundly unhelpful thoughts that usually begin with such phrases as: “I never…I always…I should have…I could have…I didn’t…”
These are corrosive beliefs.
And as I’ve talked about before in CreativeBoost, we do great harm to ourselves when we confuse belief for fact (http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=1c0b07c680) .
In my own life, I’ve had to remind myself of this lesson (http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=ba0b3400c2) many times. I get better with practice.
You own your reactions.
There are two kinds of ways you can react to your playlist: you can either let it knock you on your ass, or let it teach you to pick yourself back up.
I’ll close with this wise piece of advice from Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Storey_Mountain ) :
“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”
Very best, Patrick
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