One of my major goals in life is to act as a yellow pool of light that floods over those around me, bathing them in the sunshine and warmth that is life. I feel that, often, so many of us get caught in the negativities of life. We focus on how we dropped our coffee that morning, or how we ended up doing the majority of the group project we were assigned. We get stuck. Then there are the larger, more obvious, negatives in life; the tragedies. The taking of innocent lives, like lately in Dallas or Nice. However, in the midst of these calamities, some minuscule, others monstrous, there is always a bright side that we sometimes fail to look at.
Yes, you spilled your coffee. At least you didn’t get it on your new dress, though, and at least the stranger behind you was kind enough to help you clean it up, rather than leaving the problem solely on your shoulders. Yes, you are stuck doing a large part of the group project, essentially turning it into a solo project. But now you have a deeper, real understanding of the topic (which may come in handy later) and you’re not resting your grade in the hands of someone else, but instead controlling it yourself because you know the work will get done. And yes, lives are being taken. Senselessly. But lives are also coming together. Hundreds of individuals have rallied together, seeking ways to put an end to the frenzy, to the madness. For every mad man that runs a truck through a crowd, you have others jumping on the hood of the truck, trying to stop it, or motorcyclists attempting to leap on the door of the vehicle. For every insensitive joke about recent deaths, you have thousands more offering up prayer and good vibes, donating blood, volunteering their time. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French idealist philosopher, once said, “In the final analysis, the question of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.” In the grand scheme of things, we cannot control what happens in the world, only how the world responds to what happens. So in the break of life’s waves, whether it’s something small like spilling your coffee or something much larger that you’re watching unfold on the news rather than firsthand, I think it says a lot more how we respond to these situations, how the world responds to these situations than the actual event itself.
Call me a skewed optimist for still believing that the world is mostly good, but I do. As Anne Frank preached, I truly believe people are still good at heart. In order to see that, though, in order to believe it, it is crucial that we don’t focus on the negative actions of single individuals, who make these loud, violent statements. Rather, we need to focus on making sure that the statements of the good are louder. I’ve always been a firm believer that there is always a bright side, even if it is dimly lit. So often we are taught to turn away from the sun and shield our eyes, but perhaps that’s where the problem lies. Face the sun. Face it head on. Embrace the warmth, embrace the life, find the positives and start there. Let the negatives melt away. It all falls into perspective from there; everything finds it’s place. And if you cannot find the good, if you cannot find the positivity, then, by all means, please be it.
