Intentionally Looking for the Good

I’ve been listening to more and more meditation talks in the morning as I sketch. I find that they start my day in an optimistic and grateful mental state. In one of the talks I listened to today, Tara mentioned “intentionally looking to see the goodness” and it made me think a lot. She went on to say how we’re wired to see the bad. We’re wired to protect ourselves. To see danger.

But it ends up getting to you.

We don’t look to see the good around us. The good in others. The good in words said. I know that I have a tendency to hug the bad. I believe it more easily. I hold it closer to my heart. I think I have two reasons why I do this.

One is because I think that if I can imagine the very worst, when the bad happens it won’t hurt as much. I’ve already imagined the worst, so how bad can it get, right? Except that it can get much worse. Cause imagining the worst doesn’t actually compare to having it happen. It doesn’t prepare you. If the worst doesn’t actually happen, you wasted all those minutes, days, months imagining something that never happens. And if it does happen, you’re totally blindsided any way. Your life is upside down and it’s terrible. Because even when you do imagine the very worst, there’s a little part of you that thinks it will never happen. So when it does happen, you’re still totally crushed and devastated. So there’s almost no upside and a huge downside to this way of thinking.

The other reason I hold the bad stuff near is because I feel that remembering these will help me make decisions more carefully next time. It will prevent me from more bad stuff in the future. It’s like if I have a constant movie reel of my biggest mistakes in my head, I won’t make any more of them.

We all know how that works right?

Yep. When I think of all my mistakes, I get nervous all the time and I make even more mistakes. I am constantly scared and worried so I get stressed and the fight and flight response kicks in and takes all the blood away from my brain. Prefrontal cortex doesn’t work and I literally cannot think. So, clearly, the decisions I make in that state aren’t going anywhere productive.

So neither of these reasons are useful. Holding the bad stuff near and dear isn’t really helping me. But even more importantly, there’s an incredible amount of data that says looking for the good in your life actually makes you happier. Creating a daily gratitude practice makes people more wholehearted. Intentionally looking for the good changes your life.

What if we extended that to the people around you. What if we always looked for the good in others? Especially in those who annoy us. Especially in the people who try our nerves a bit. The ones for whom we hold anger. The ones that seem to always wrong us, etc. It’s easy to see the best in the ones we love. But if we just intentionally looked for the good in every single person around us, I bet it would completely change our life and our relationships. I love this idea and I want to give it a try. For the next few weeks, I will intentionally look for the good in everyone around me. I will assume the best but also really look to see what good I can see in each person I interact with.

I will also look for the good in my day-to-day life. My gratitude practice has fallen sideways and I want to intentionally bring it back. Now that I am feeling a bit better, too, I want to hold on to this and not let it go.

So here’s to a few weeks of intentionally looking for the good. Maybe you can join me?