Stay positive

My main focus is always on making people understand one thing, and that is this - ups and downs, highs and lows are all part of life.

Life would be so boring if we started living a completely consistent one.

Imagine yourself eating the same kind of food every day, or having the exact same conversation from morning to night. You would manage it for a day. Maybe a week. Possibly a month, if you were stubborn about it. But there would come a point where all you wanted was to run away and try something totally different.

It happens on a daily basis in small ways. Eat the same thing for a stretch of days and you eventually start hating that particular item. The food didn’t change. You did.

The part we forget when we are in the low

Here is what is strange about this. We accept it completely when it comes to food, seasons, weather, songs we play too often. Nobody panics in February that winter is permanent.

But when a difficult stretch arrives in our own life, we lose the plot entirely. We stop treating it as weather and start treating it as climate. This is my life now. This is who I am. This is how it is going to be.

That is the single most convincing lie a bad phase tells you, and it tells it to everybody. It is very good at its job, because when you are inside it, you cannot see the edges. All the evidence around you agrees with it.

So from all this I just want to draw your attention to one thing: if similar things are happening around us, there will definitely come a point where something new happens. Not because you deserved it, and not because you were positive enough to earn it. Because nothing holds still. It never has.

What “stay positive” actually means

I should be clear about what I am not saying, because this phrase gets thrown around carelessly.

I am not telling you to smile through something genuinely painful, or to pretend a hard week is secretly fine. That is not positivity. That is acting, and it is exhausting, and everybody can tell.

Staying positive means keeping hold of one specific fact when everything in you wants to let go of it: this is a phase, and phases end. You can be furious. You can be tired. You can have a week where you get nothing done and cry at a mildly sad advertisement. You can do all of that and still keep hold of that one fact.

That is the whole practice. It is much less cheerful than the phrase suggests, and much more useful.

Wait for the change

So until then, enjoy the taste of that fruit with a smile.

Wait for the change. Changes are a must in life.

And when the good phase comes - because it will - try to remember this works in both directions. The high is also weather. It is also not permanent. That is not a depressing thought. It is the thing that makes you actually pay attention while you are in it, instead of assuming there is unlimited more where that came from.

Life is like changing seasons, after all. The people who suffer least are not the ones who get more summers. They are the ones who stopped being shocked by winter.

Always remember: your current situation is not your final destination.

Keep some evidence

One practical thing that helps more than any of this on the days you cannot feel it.

Keep some evidence. A note somewhere with two or three of the hardest stretches you have already come through, and how long each one lasted.

When you are inside a bad phase, your memory will insist that it has always been like this and always will be. That is the phase talking, and it is very convincing. A written record is the one thing that argues back with facts rather than encouragement.

Four months, it will say. It lasted four months, and then it stopped.

-kashish