Has it ever crossed your mind that positive thinking has a negative side or that negative thinking has a positive side? Some people get so caught up in self help and being success oriented that they over do it. Sometimes, I just want to yell something negative at someone or say something incredibly pessimistic. I have a dark and sometimes twisted sense of humor, and too much positivity gets under my skin.

I read several different articles about positive thinking and success today. I don’t know if it was just pure luck, but all of them said something about getting rid of all negativity in your life. They said to rid yourself of all toxic and negative relationships and so forth. That’s all fine and good, but nobody has a purely positive life with no negative influence.

Nobody is Only Positive or Negative

I am a student of Zen as well as many other philosophies – from Friedrich Nietzsche to Lao Tzu and all in between.  I’ve never met a single person who was all good or all bad. I’m sure that even Hitler had his good days and was a fun loving guy. I’m sure the pope has had wild sex fantasies as well as other secrets. I hear people say stuff like, “He is a good person.” Maybe so, but no one is pure as the driven snow.

Because of my background in Zen, I see things much differently than most people. One prevalent concept in Zen is that everything has an opposite. You can’t have good without evil, light without dark, yin without yang an so on. Every person reflects that truth inside them. As humans, we are balancing between absolute chaos or negativity, and absolute order or goodness. We can never be only one – we are somewhere in the middle of both.

The idea is that good is evil or evil is good, two sides of the same coin, forming one whole. It’s a ubiquitous duality inherent to the human condition and our perception of existence. When a person tries to only be positive 24-7, they are out of balance. The idea is not to rid oneself of all negativity and be a shimmering ray of positive brilliance; it is to embrace the concept that we are all both positive and negative.

In my article, Sadness – Severing Toxic Friendships, you will see I had to make many hard decisions in life. I said good riddance to my drug abusing friends; however, it does not mean I cannot be great friends with a negative, pessimistic asshole.

If everyone on Earth rejected every negative influence in their lives and only associated with healthy, beneficial, successful and positive people, there would be endless billions of rejects. There would be an area the size of New York containing the tiny handful of all the positive winners. The rest of the world (99.9%) would only have losers, degenerates, jerks and whiners.

If I personally followed all the positive advice I heard, I would say things like this to people, “I heard you say something sardonic earlier. Please get away from me – you are toxic and not conducive to my success and positivity.”

Or…”I’m sorry, I cannot be your friend. I heard you whine at work today. I will work with you, but that’s as far as it goes.”

People trying to be super positive don’t say things like that – they hide their feelings and only think it. In my opinion, that is being two-faced and deceptive. It’s much like a religious person looking down on others because they are not. They think things like, “After she dies, she will go to hell. I will go to heaven because I’m a Christian.”

Embrace Both Sides

Instead of thinking of myself as being good or bad, I see myself as balanced. I understand evil and goodness. In everyday life, I don’t reject someone because they are negative or always happy. I accept the way they are. If they grind on my nerves, I may not want to hang around them every day, but I don’t look down on them.

There’s always a time to be negative or positive. Sometimes, an extremely sarcastic comment can be hilarious. If I hear people being too positive, I’ll say something negative just to shake them up or kill the monotony (usually to be funny). If people are down, I’ll be positive. It’s all about balance and embracing all we are. We all need to express emotions. When I get mad, I release it – in a good way. Exercise, blogging or any art are great ways to get rid of anger and tension.

Years ago while working in sales, I had to go to lots of positive thinking seminars. After 3 hours of some guy talking about success and being positive, it makes a group of people mad! It’s irritating to hear too much of it. When you get all fired up about being positive, there is only one outcome: you will fall from that feeling and become the opposite. We can only take so much of anything. It’s like going on a diet. If you go on a diet, you will go off the diet. The same applies to your mood of perception of life. Instead of trying to be all positive or writhing in negativity, we should find balance in between. To be perfectly clear by comparison: don’t go on a diet, just adopt healthy eating habits. Don’t try to be overly anything, just adopt life’s natural balance. When dealing with negativity, you have to learn how to not take things personally. When you take everything personally, it is more harmful than just dealing with it without taking it personally. I hope this is clear enough to express my idea.

One of the greatest aspects of writing or blogging is being able to express emotions and get it out. I love to see a writer explode. If I tried to hide my feelings and contain everything, I would burst at the seams. I like to take chances in blogging. I used to have a complex that if I wrote something too riveting or hateful, that my readers would abandon me. I will never be too professional to be human.

Many of the more prominent bloggers give that advice – to not offend your readers or get too far out of what you normally write. I completely disagree! Let it out and have no fear. Write what you want and never let anyone dictate what you should or shouldn’t write.

Many people see life as being a glass half full (optimistic) or half empty (pessimistic). I see it completely differently. I see life as a glass always empty. If it gets anything in it, I have to pour it out through self expression. Whether it be writing, drawing, playing music or whatever, my glass must remain empty. This is a main difference between Zen philosophy and western philosophy. This article is an attempt to explain my views in layman terms. I hope you found it useful!

*Picture source: Wikipedia: Yin-Yang

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