"Good" vs "Bad"

How many people get the powerful opportunity to begin again in their lives?

And, if that opportunity presents itself, how do we interpret it?

New beginnings can fall into many different categories. It could be a new relationship, or a fresh divorce. It could be moving away from your home town, or moving back. It could be starting a new job, or losing your current one. Feeling healthy and fit from a workout schedule, or just starting to consider getting a gym membership.

As you read the above paragraph, how did these opposing situations feel to you? Was there one that felt good, and one that felt bad? Did you automatically assign a negative association to one, and a positive to the other?

What if you were better able to control your perceptions of negative vs positive experiences? Instead of inherently believing that missing the bus this morning on the way to work was a bad thing, and going to result in a bad day... what if it was an opportunity to walk on a nice morning? Or stop at a coffee shop you always see out the window, but can never seem to get to? What if moving out of a home/relationship you've lived in for years and into an apartment alone wasn't entirely tragic, but also an opportunity for you to remember and explore who you are?

As humans, we have a negativity bias. It's a tendency to dwell in, or focus on, the negative. This is an evolutionary function of the brain designed to protect us. Paying attention to dangerous or negative things helped us to survive. So if 10 "good" things and 5 "bad" things happen in a day, your brain is likely going to think it was a "bad day". What do you normally tell your friends and family about? All the wonderful things that happened to you? Or do we generally focus on the complaints? Now knowing this, what if we could pay closer attention to our own interpretation of the events of our day?

If this is interesting to you, some questions to ask yourself could be:

How am I defining "good" and "bad"?

What makes me define them like that?

What would it look like if I chose to see them differently?

How often during my day am I focused on something negative?

How would I feel if I could let that go?

All this is not to encourage toxic positivity. If something happens that hurts you and is undeniably an unpleasant experience, make sure you process that for what it is. We're bound to encounter that in this beautiful and wild life. But I think it's valuable to challenge our natural born negativity bias, and do some critical thinking on what we see as "bad". You might find you could live an entirely different day, if you want to.

It can always be half full.