Positivity Challenge

I am by nature a pessimist and cynic. The glass is half empty … or completely empty, depending on whether I have been struck down by PMS. A dear friend of mine said something to me this week about trying to concentrate on more positive things and so it began… our challenge to be positive. I have decided to stay away from all newspapers and focus on good things that are uplifting. Just for this week, mind you. Don’t want to lose my vibe completely. Since that conversation, I have been sending my friend Youtube links to “restore our faith in humanity” and I have to admit that once or twice the video clips had me in tears.
There is so much negativity. The world seems to be filled with pointlessness, hopelessness and just plain evil. But then there are stories you hear, or events you witness, or clips you watch that touch you, that remind you that there IS still good out there. There ARE still people who care. Amidst everything, there is hope. Granted, the horrors seem to outweigh the good, but the good is there.
As I am writing this, I have a picture in my head of a photograph I once saw. It was a flower that had pushed its way up and through a concrete pavement and was blooming. In a place where there should not have been any life, there was. There was hope.
Sometimes I get really bad days, days where I just want to give up on everything. I want to curl myself up into a ball and die. I had one of those a while back. As I sat on the side of the bath in my towel, crying about everything and nothing and I told myself, “tomorrow will be better”… I didn’t believe it at all. I knew I was fooling myself and so I went to bed and cried myself to sleep. Then tomorrow came and surprisingly I did feel better. I was back to my normal self. I am by no means saying this works all the time, but every now and then it does. Living with depression, I have come to realise that when I have off days / weeks that eventually the feeling of utter crapness eventually stops and I bounce back, albeit very slowly sometimes.
I think it is the same with life in general. We are so bombarded by negativity that we start accepting that that is just how the world is with no exceptions. But there are exceptions. People can surprise us. Sometimes it is just someone smiling at you on the street, or someone helping me change a flat tyre. But they are there. Good people still exist. We just need to be on the look-out for them.
And so it is day 3 of my challenge and so far, so good. Let’s see what happens. I may just become an optimist… or not!