Silver linings

How can I see the silver lining when negativity is so overwhelming?

Many believe life’s default mode is happiness, that some unfortunate people get to experience suffering. Unfortunately, it is not the case. Life has no such default emotion, with the entire spectrum of emotions with equal chance. Probably, as happiness feels very good, and suffering does not, we started searching for happiness so much that we started believing it is the default mode. After all, if we are searching for something so hard, it has to be.

In short, trying to be positive has become a kind of “happy-ology”- an attempt at being happy all the time.

Probably there comes the question of finding the silver line.

Trust me, some clouds are so dark that there is no silver lining.

But that is okay.

We did not need all the clouds to have a silver lining. Negativity is overwhelming not because it is everywhere, but because we don’t miss any. Put another way, overcoming the overwhelming negativity did not mean that we see positivity in everything. Often, it required us to see positivity wherever it is. But we miss most of the positives.

But, how do we get to see those positives?

The shortest possible answer, “by becoming aware.” A large part of reducing negativity means that we start focusing on the positives around. And once you start looking, well, you start finding. While the ‘negatives’ remain negative, we can still find a lot of good things in our surroundings.

The trouble is, we miss them.

We miss them because we call them mundane. We consider them less important. We forgot that “an uneventful day was actually a good day.” In waiting to have the exciting good days, which were rare, if not non-existent, we missed those average days.

Sincerely,

Dr. Noufal Hameed?