There is something new to be learned every day. Sometimes its a major life lesson. Sometimes is as simple as discovery a new flavor of ice cream. Mostly though it’s finding out that a perspective on something known has changed.

I honestly believe that the course of the day is set by how the day is approached. If you wake up feeling good and having a sense of what life has to offer, then the day will mostly not be a bad one, perhaps even a good one. But if you wake up feeling unrested or troubled, that feeling will linger throughout the day, even if something positive happens. Occasionally, an event can turn the course of a day, but that is rare.

Life is not always positive, neither is it always negative. the mind set does that, sets it. I have often said that negativity is like an addiction. It soothes a wounded soul through the falsehood of acknowledgement. It’s as if recognizing the underbelly of life is given more credulity and somehow feeds itself. It’s far easier to see what wrong in life when that all your looking for. It is a convenient answer as to why kindness is in short supply.

But positivity can hold its own toxins. Fake happiness isn’t nearly as toxic and believing there is something positive in every experience. Sometimes bad shit happens. Sometimes life takes a turn and sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, so to speak. Finding something good in everything isn’t so important as seeing the world as it truly is. There are experiences that just must be gotten through.

Sometimes the best that can be hoped for is that a painful experience doesn’t hide the rest of what life has to offer. Many things in life are just what they are. There is a line in the movie The Deerhunter (1978). “This is this. This isn’t something else. This is this.” That was that character’s approach to life. He couldn’t really lift himself to see the joys, but neither was he dragged down by the sorrows.

Toxic positivity creates its own drag. The acrobatics of emotion can be exhausting. The inability to take life as it is given is self-defeating. The lightness of being is false state of existence. Life becomes a much heavier because the weight of fallaciousness.