The Most Important Lesson I’ve Learned About Being Positive

And it was taught to me by something my friend’s grandmother said to me after her terminal cancer diagnosis

My friend’s grandmother getting a terminal cancer diagnosis taught me the most important lesson I’ve ever learned about being positive: it truly is a way of thinking.

Bad things happen, everyone knows that, they are an inevitability, not only because it is the bad things that happen that we use as a barometer by which to define the good things, but because literally it is an inevitability specifically because bad things just happen. They do. No matter how hard we work to try to stop bad things from happening, bad things will still happen.

This is why being positive truly is a way of thinking, because bad things will always happen, accidents will happen, people will get diagnosed with cancer, some the terminal form; people we love will die, some way before their time. People we love will lose their jobs. We may lose our jobs. We may get diagnosed with terminal cancer. Shit just happens.

This reality made me realise that trying to completely avoid negativity is a lost cause, a pointless cause, in fact it is virtually a waste of effort.

This does not mean that you should not try to avoid it, you absolutely should, and there are many forms of negativity you can avoid, for example, a person who is critical of you, you can avoid that person and you should do, in fact, you should kick that person from your life if they are being critical of you all the time.

But a terminal cancer diagnosis, which is a pretty big negative, there is nothing you can do to avoid that. And in my view understanding that fact, that no matter how hard you try to avoid them negative happenings are an inevitability of life, is a massively important lesson to learn if you are to live a happy life, because only by understanding it can you learn that positive ones are also an inevitability, but only if you make them as such.

I just wish to repeat that for emphasis: negativity is an inevitability, you can limit it but not stop it, positivity on the other hand is not an inevitability. Unless you make it as such.

This is why being positive is a way of thinking because you have to think it into being, think positivity into being. You have to literally create positivity otherwise it won’t exist.

And if you don’t create it can never exist, but once you realise that you do have to create it and start trying to create it, you will make it exist. You have that power, to create positivity, and no matter how bad the situation may be, should you choose to, you have the power to derive positives from it.

To prove this I want to share my friend’s grandmother’s response to her terminal cancer diagnosis:

“Having terminal cancer has given me the wake-up call I needed to live out my bucket list, which I never would have done if I had not got cancer.”

Think about that, the cancer is not a positive, but she found a positive all the same that to her was stronger than the negative of being diagnosed with terminal cancer. To reiterate, she made a conscious decision to derive a positive from a negative situation and focused on that positive so much that it is now stronger than the negative that created it.

She could have lingered on the terminal cancer diagnosis, lamented it, and I imagine there are moments when she does. But what would be the benefit of her doing so? That was what she said to me: “What would be the benefit of me doing so? All that would happen would be that what remained of my life would be spent in sadness, fear and negativity.”

The intelligence of those words is mind-boggling. Basically, what she is saying is, that through a conscious choice that she has made, the cancer diagnosis is going to bring a positive benefit to her life. The cancer is not a positive, and I wish to be clear that she is not saying that it is, what she is saying is that the diagnosis has brought about a change in her and inspired her to do something that without it she believes she would not have done.

Could she have lived a better life without the diagnosis? Who knows? Who cares? Not her because she has had the diagnosis and all she can do, all anyone can do, is react to what is known not what isn’t known, and lingering on what isn’t and can never be known is the path to unhappiness.

My friend’s grandmother without a doubt understands this reality, which is why she has chosen to accept what she does know, to accept what is, and use that knowledge as a means of creating positive energy. Why wouldn’t she? Why waste a ton of energy being sad when you can use the energy to try to be happy?

The reason is that instinctually that is the natural reaction. Literally, it is natural to focus on the negatives, we have evolved to do this because historically doing so has been useful in regard to keeping ourselves safe.

So we are literally hardwired to focus on the negatives, our brains want us to do so because it thinks that doing so will best keep us safe.

Our brains are wrong. Thanks to the technological revolution of the last two hundred years, and the societal changes that the revolution has wrought, this way of thinking is now outdated and unnecessary. Basically, through technological innovation we have outgrown our own instincts, and so we need to work to teach our instincts to catch up to the world in which we live.

That means if your natural reaction to bad things happening in your life is to focus on the negatives then the answer is utilising the same tactics that my friend’s grandmother has used, and that is stopping yourself from being your own enemy by obsessing over the negatives and becoming your own saviour by teaching yourself to obsessively search for and create the positives. That’s what I now plan on doing!

A few final words

There are always positives to be found and it is those positives that in this day and age help us to survive more than anything. This is why even when it appears that there are no positives, like in the case of my friend’s grandmother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, there are, it’s just we need to look a little bit harder to find them, need to work a little bit harder to focus upon them.

Or rather you have to work to be positive, work and work until being positive replaces your natural inclination of being negative. And the only way to do this in my view, is by acknowledging that is an inevitability that bad things will happen, but our response to those happenings are not an inevitability. We can choose to find the negatives or we can choose to find the positives, to create the positives.

What I’m saying is that everyone has the power to be positive, you just have to choose to be and it will be so.

That’s what my friend’s grandmother did, she chose to be, and made it so, and all of us have within us the power to do this, we just have to choose to use that power. Choose to be positive.

And that’s what my friend’s grandmother’s diagnosis and her response to it taught me: being positive truly is a way of thinking. Choose to embrace that way of thinking, to become a creator of positivity, or don’t, the choice will always be yours.

That’s all for me for today, thanks for reading!

If you found this post interesting be certain to check out my other posts for how to live a positive life:

Posts about positive living by David Graham

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