Positivity is all we need to live well

Humans are endowed with the power of choice. Choose well and our life flows with honey; choose bad and our life is covered with gall. As we walk down the street, when we choose the right path, we see warm scenes and encounter friendly and happy faces. To choose another alley would land us in squalor, filth, swears and solemnity.

As we step into the right workplace, we are greeted with a warm and genuine, Good morning; have a nice day; you look splendid today; colleagues love you and admire you, treat you as a marvellous gem of creation, you are respected and valued. To fall into the wrong workplace, you are landlocked in rules, enmeshed in a culture of filth, despite, criticism, racism (explicit and implicit), blame and threat, and swarmed in the sea of endless carnage of your person and self-worth in the name of your wellbeing.

As you sit down to talk with a right person, you hear love and positivity, you see warmth and respect and great things, and you leave with enthusiasm instilled by the talk. To talk with a person of a different sort, you are forced to hear their complaints and endless misfortunes; maybe they are correct in their complaints, they are also innocent in their misfortunes; you do not blame them, but you are left with misery, and your mind is filled with miserable pictures, which baggage you carry with you for a long while.

As you get along with your right friends, they put you first and they may never say but always show that you are the most important person who is always cheerful and inspiring; they make you feel you are valued and they make you strive higher and better: You just want to do the same to them. To go with “friends”, they pour their sorrow onto you as if you were deserved to be their receptacles; they show the worst side of human nature convincingly, they confide in you endless inside stories and gossips. “Friends” are friends, that is what friends are for, right? but they make your life screwed with darkness. They always say, “Let there be dark, and all is black!”

As you read a right book, it reveals the best side of life and human relations. Though not a Bible, it relates love and kindness to enable you to reap nothing but a great and happy life. The book inspires and lights up your days. To read a wrong book, it is academic-like and takes everything in the critical light. It criticises without even telling you what is being criticised; rather, it is telling you that taking the critical approach is a treasured thing in that world. It condemns the system, it blames the failure of the government and foreign things, it leaves the trail of blood behind its talks. It may “inspire” in a different sense; rather, it incites you to a habit or culture of “criticise and blame.” Taking that approach in life, you find people leaving, you find your life fumed with anger and strewn with failures.

As you attend a right school or university, you are well educated, that is, you are not taught much, no pressure to cram things into you; rather, you are inspired to bring out things from within yourself, which is the meaning of the word educate, “to bring out from within”. Your teachers are always slow to criticise and are never judgemental, but are always a source of inspiration, a source of encouragement, a source of guidance. You appear never to have made “mistakes”; you are simply educated to find out whether that opinion or finding of yours is sustainable and if not how to improve on it. You learn, you are educated, and you are inspired. To attend an educational institution of a different sort, the teachers behave like saints, like out-of-this-world animals, they dictate knowledge, you take notes. You are always criticised as you are told that it is aimed to prompt you to learn, but you are prompted nowhere and you learn nothing. Your shoulder appears scotching hot and they never give it a touch to acknowledge your merit or to impart encouragement. Your failure is exaggerated and you are told that if you fail there, you fail life. You graduate with diffidence; with a piece of useless paper filled with criticism, humiliation and disrespect.

As you turn on the TV or radio, it immediately spits out killing, fire and fury….

Now, you turn it off. It dawns on you that you need to live out of negativity. Reflecting on your experience, you come to the realisation that it is positivity and positive people that have taken you so far, for your happiness, for your success, for your contribution to others’ success and happiness. You do not want to hear stories of bodily operations any more, nor do you want to go near negativity. You want to choose positive and go positive.

As you lift your head from your desk, you see a smiling face and hear a pleasant voice, “Good morning, darling, you are such a star!” There you go… and go to the bright side of everything, the godly side rather than the satan-ly side. After all, it is your life; the choice is firmly in your hands.