Week 7 – No Negative Thoughts?

I thought I had this one aced.  I’m a very optimistic person, and felt that I could honestly say I rarely have negative thoughts, so I seriously doubted that I would have to start over.  Well, I was in for a big surprise.

I was looking back over my day, smugly reassuring myself that I had experienced no negative thoughts.  Then I remembered a conversation earlier that day with my daughter.  She has a friend who is rather unusual, and we were laughing at something she had said, not with humor, but basically making fun of her for one of her weird ideas.  Maybe you wouldn’t consider that a negative thought, but I decided that because I do not frequently experience negativity, for me it was negative.  So, I wiped away the smugness and started over.

Then I ran into a personal situation that brought fear of the future.   Fear?  Yes, I became aware that fear is a negative thought.  That’s when I realized that negative thoughts invade my life much more often that I thought.  I may not get upset easily at others, think bad things about others (or myself), but negativity comes in many guises.  I began to examine myself more closely for awareness of areas that, for me, are negative thoughts.  It made a difference in the way I view things, and I found out that I had to keep starting over.  It was a most humbling experience.