The Spiritual Side of Being Positive

Photo by Bekka Mongeau: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-printer-paper-22221/

As we go through our day-to-day lives, it is really pretty easy to have feelings of frustration and helplessness; feelings that we have no control over our life; feelings that bad things will inevitably happen. Most of us wake up in the morning and listen to the news or read the daily newspaper – or we do this when we go to bed. To say the least, we are usually bombarded by bad news; by wars and killing; by senseless murder in our cities and communities; by countless cases of human’s abuse of other people; by reports of disease and death; by politics which wrenches our soul. If we look at the big picture, when we look at world history, we find few periods that are not marked by aggression and war; by prejudice and arrogance; by famine and plague or natural calamities all of which cause great human suffering.

Given all of this, there is little wonder why human beings can develop a sense of pessimism if not outright hopelessness. Some people do. The interesting thing is that people do not approach the difficulties in their life the same way. Faced with similar circumstances, some people adopt an attitude of pessimism and negativity. They focus on what is bad and fail to recognize or accept the positive things in their life. Others tend to make light of the bad things that happen to them and adopt a positive, optimistic attitude. They seem to always look for the bright side in any given situation.

The attitude that people adopt in this regard is reflected in their personality and how they project themselves to others. We all know people who fit both descriptions. The key point is that, to an extent, depending upon the situation, a person chooses whether to be positive or negative and how they project themselves to the world and to the people around them. Pessimism and optimism are choices we make; they are not automatic reactions, and we all need to think about this.

When really terrible things happen to people it is, of course, understandable that they become negative or pessimistic; at least for a while. Nearly all of us will be in the short-term. This is obviously normal. When we witness devastation such as the west coast wildfires, hurricanes and the recent tornados in the Midwest, we often see pessimistic people. Curiously though, in these disasters, we often see optimistic too; people who choose to take a positive look at their situation. Last week, for example, I saw on the news an interview with a man who house was flattened by a tornado. His comments were, “Well – I am alive, and my family is OK and I am very thankful for this. We will rebuild.” The problem is that if a person does not or cannot shake their negative feelings it will affect who they are, who they are becoming and how they relate with others.

The interesting thing with pessimists and optimists is you can find both in any given situation and the seriousness of the situation isn’t necessarily a factor.

I’ve met people who have a good life, a good job and a good family. They are healthy and seemingly better off than many others but they have a very sour attitude on life. They are negative people. When the slightest thing goes wrong, they project a “woe is me attitude.” What is happening here is this type of person is essentially viewing themselves as the center of the universe. They quickly find fault with just about everything. They refuse to place their life in the context of other people and to recognize all the good things they have. In the extreme, these people can be toxic, and they exude negativity and a negative energy which they project to everyone around them. These types of people are not and cannot be happy so long as they remain the center of their universe.

Then, of course, there are optimists. Sometimes despite overwhelming problems and serious troubles, these type of people constantly look for the bright side of any situation. Even in the midst of a terrible situation they refuse to stay depressed. They sometimes even force themselves to smile and say something funny or kind or even inspirational. Even in despair, optimists choose to be positive.

I mentioned some weeks ago a friend of mine I visited in Sloan Kettering Cancer hospital in New York. On the day he died he said to me, “Chris – I’m the luckiest man in the world. When he saw my puzzled face, he told me all the great things that he had had in his life. Shortly after this he passed away. He was in his late 40s. My friend was an eternal optimist and throughout his life, his outlook and personality uplifted everyone he came in contact with.

As President Harry Truman once said:

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities, and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

Being optimistic or pessimistic is a very human characteristic. Animals don’t have the ability to choose a positive or negative attitude. They just react to the world around them with instincts and, in higher animals, perhaps some emotion. Why humans can choose to be positive or negative; pessimistic or optimistic, is a curious thing.

Just about everything that makes up a human being, including our thoughts and emotions, has evolved over millions of years. I find it interesting that we can choose to be negative or positive in just about every situation. You would think that humans would have evolved to always be positive because being positive and optimistic leads to survival – more than being negative. To me it shows that evolution is a lot more complex and uncertain than some might think!

Great people are not negative. They are not pessimists. Great people are always more optimistic, which is what drives them to do things that change the world because their optimism tells them they can succeed; even in the midst of enormous obstacles. The Declaration of Independence on July 4th of 1776 was approved by the Continental Congress – a group of men who believed they really could become independent from Great Britain; an idea that was really not very logical or reasonable at all at the time. Were the Continental Congress a group of pessimists with a negative attitude, America would not exist.

All through American history it was positive leaders who continually changed and shaped America for the better, often times against seemingly insurmountable odds. President Lincoln often suffered from clinical depression, but he refused to succumb to this disease. He chose, instead, to remain positive and optimistic that the North could suppress the rebellion of the South. He took an incredibly bold and positive step when he wrote and announced the Emancipation Proclamation. Similarly, Martin Luther King was certainly a positive and optimistic man. When he gave his famous “I have a dream” speech it was a measure of his incredible optimism – and guess what, his dream became a reality. Civil Rights legislation followed soon after. Martin Luther King was an optimist.

And certainly in more recent times, we can reflect on the incredible optimism and positive power of Nelson Mandela – a man imprisoned for 27 years because of his crimes to eliminate the scourge of apartheid from the land of South Africa; a man who chose to remain in prison until all other prisoners for the same cause were freed. Nelson Mandela had superhuman positive and optimistic strength. In the midst of his imprisonment, what led him to believe he could help eliminate apartheid??? By all logic, at the time, this was impossible and yet he made it so because of his attitude – an attitude he choose.

Look at Alexy Navaly – a man poisoned by Putin. Yet he returned to Russia knowing he would be imprisoned, and Putin had him poisoned again in prison. Navaly loved his country and believed by his actions that he would help to change Russia. He was an optimist in the face of death. And while, his dreams of a free Russia certainly have not happened yet – I believe they eventually will. How will history view the actions of Navaly and those of Putin?. I think you know the answer.

Many people imprisoned for political crimes become embittered by the experience. They can become negative, pessimistic and sometimes hateful people. In many cases, if given the opportunity, they seek revenge against their enemies. Because of their hatred, they choose the negative. Not Nelson Mandela. Against all odds, he remained positive. He forgave his enemies and made them his friends. His positive energy and defacto love changed his country and, in the long term, I believe the world.

In so many professions, we find the role of the positive, the optimistic, changing the world. To me, one of the most notable scientists was Stephen Hawking. Born in 1942, Hawking was a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Early in his life, Hawking developed a form of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) which, over time, progressively paralyzed his body. For decades, Hawking had little or no control over his body and he could barely even utter a sound.

Despite these overwhelming odds, he became one of the most brilliant cosmologists in the world producing numerous books and papers on cosmology and astrophysics. Had Hawking chosen a negative, pessimistic view of his life; a choice that, by rights would seem to have been quite logical, he would never have produced the vast work which has given cosmology so much in the past several decades. Science and human knowledge is richer because of Hawking’s choice to be positive.

What successful athlete do you know who has a dower, negative view of life and a pessimistic view of their ability? There is a reason there aren’t any. It is because people succeed when they choose to be positive; when they adopt an optimistic attitude toward what they can do, when they continue to strive despite huge obstacles. One of the jobs of a coach is to constantly affirm a positive, optimistic attitude on what is possible; even in the times when the odds are really tough.

Well, some might say, “I know there are positive, optimistic people and I recognize this plays into how successful a person can be and how they can change the world, but you don’t understand how miserable and difficult my life is. I wish I had a choice to be positive.”

To this I say, I understand how a difficult moment can make every one of us negative or pessimistic. This is very normal, but it is by a person’s choice that they remain this way. Being a negative and pessimistic person is not a condition we have no control over. It is a choice that we make, and this choice makes us who we are, how we are perceived by others and whether or not we can make a positive difference in our life and the world around us.

There are few circumstance more horrible than those experienced by the victims of the German holocaust; innocent men and women and children arrested in the middle of the night and thrust into slave labor and extermination camps where murder and starvation where everyday occurrences. How in the world in such circumstances could a person even begin to think about adopting a positive and optimistic view of life when they witnessed the murder of their loved ones and they themselves experienced unspeakable trauma? And yet – some people in the camps chose to be optimistic and they refused to lose hope. They refused to succumb to despair and to adopt a negative view of the world.

The noted holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, put it this way:

“Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything for the circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it became clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man (or woman) can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him (or her) – mentally and spiritually. A person may retain their human dignity even in a concentration camp."

He continued:

“The way in which a (person) accepts their fate and all the suffering it entails, the way a person takes up their cross, gives them ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to their life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation a person may forget their human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a person either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford them. And this decides whether a person is worthy of their suffering or not.”

“As each situation in life represents a challenge to a man (or woman) and presents a problem for them to solve - the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, humans should not ask what the meaning of their life is, but rather they must recognize that it is they who are asked. In a word, each person is questioned by life; and they can only answer to life by answering for their own life.”

As Victor Frankly also believed, a person is positive or negative; a pessimist or an optimist by their own choice – ultimately regardless of the situation. While it is understandable that people in extremely difficult situations can be negative – to remain negative can be a poison to their own life and well-being and it can, in turn, severely impact their relationship with others, including those they love. It can also negatively affect their ability to cope with life and rise to the many challenges that face them. Negativity and pessimism impact a person’s spirituality and their outlook on life. It can destroy their relationship with humanity, with the sacred source of life, that transcending mystery – define in so many ways by the world religions.

Simply put, spiritual people, those that connect with the sacred in some way – however they define it, are not negative and pessimistic people. Instead, spiritual people are positive people, and they adopt an attitude that it is possible for a given situation to become better in some way. No matter how difficult a situation – there is always a bright side.

As Sir Winston Churchill said:

For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else.

Negative and pessimistic people are not happy people. They find fault with everything. Nothing is ever good enough. In the extreme, they are often selfish people who believe the world revolves around them, therefore anything bad that happens to them is the result of unfair treatment by others or life itself. Sadly, we all know people like this.

There was an Irish woman I once knew. Her life was filled with challenges and sorrows but whenever a person asked her how she was – her answer was always the same, “Grand, just grand,” she would say. She always wanted to project a positive outlook on her life.

I really do think a person’s commitment to being optimistic and positive plays a critical factor in their ultimate happiness. Let us all try to learn to smile and laugh and bring joy to others – even in the most difficult of circumstances.

As the author and teacher Charles Larson from American University said:

“Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet. To make all your friends feel that there is something good in them To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true. To think only the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best. To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own. To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile. To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others. To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble. To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud words but great deeds. To live in faith that the whole world is on your side so long as you are true to the best that is in you.” ― Christian D. Larson, Your Forces and How to Use Them

Reverend Christopher McMahon

UUMH Chatham

Sunday, June 1, 2025