The Appreciative Life is Better

Just about everywhere we go we will see things the eye can see and hear things our ears can hear that will magnify the magic known to life: the appreciative context.

Still too many of us, and too often, clamour to draw attention to ugliness over beauty, when the beauty is just too magnificent—in fairness and equity—to ignore or pass over.

It reminds of a good proverb that is not really about women, but a broader truth:

“Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion.”

~Proverbs 11:22 (NIV).

Like looking the gift horse in the mouth, and trying pessimistically to see what little fault there may be in anything, our lives shrivel and die for want of life when we choose to see the negative in front of the positive. And let’s not leave it there; others’ lives too are shifted off-balance in response to our negativity.

To Be Positive or Negative? – A Choice

It takes a better person to note the positive and encourage rather than be negative, criticise and therefore condemn. Not that the latter person is a worse person in their own right; they just aren’t living up to their potential—a God-cursed shame that is, right there. And most of the time we’re blind to it, in those negative moments.

Both realities are real and both a visible: the positive and negative.

One only is set for blessing, the other apportioned to cursing. One is set in joy; the other misery—personally and interpersonally. One is destined for a multiplicity of growth; the other is bound for not only atrophy to the good, but hypertrophy to the bad—cancerous thought and malignant action.

Everyone of ‘Good Heart and Mind,’ Surely, Wants the Better Life

It is clear what is better, both beginning from and with us, to the extension of our relationships.

But we’ll often find the temptation to focus on the negative is very contingent on our mood. It is a great investment then, to be more across the expanse of our moods, to be preparing for hormonal and life variances as far as possible; to see appreciatively as far as we can.

Bearing in mind that we all want the best of life, and we can see how we’ll get there, we can start to think more in ways of the positive; the silver lining to our clouds and so forth.

How we think is how we are.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.