Focusing on the positives – they are much more

The real story of a teacher who wanted to educate the young learners with life lessons that will prove valuable for them in the future is a simple way to talk about happiness in a world that attempts to explain it in the most complicated and sophisticated ways.

According to the story, the teacher decided to start the lesson with a test. He put a paper on each student’s desk and told them they would have a 10-minute test. Once they turn the page on the other side they will be able to see the questions of the test and start writing down their answers. He kindly suggested that they should not worry about the grades and just focus on answering the questions. Once they turned the page on the other side they saw a blank page with a dot on the center of the paper.

The teacher then told them that they would have to describe what they see on the paper without asking any questions and that this was the structure of this test. The students became uncomfortable and started taking this bizarre test. In the end, the teacher took all the papers with the students’ answers and read them out loud. With no exception, every student talked about the weird dot on the blank page trying to explain its position, size, and color with the attempt to link it to what they guessed their teacher had in mind.

After he reassured them that no one would be evaluated for this exam, the kids relaxed and were delighted to listen to the explanations their teacher had to give.

The teacher commented on the fact that all children focused on the dot on the paper but none of them attempted to describe the rest of the picture. It was as if the dot had consumed all of their energy and caught everyone’s attention. The dark dot represented the troubles people have in life. In reality, problems are very simple and very narrow. However, we choose to focus our attention on them while life provides a bunch of opportunities to make us feel happy. The positive facts are always much more than the negatives.

This leads us to our next question. Why do we fail to focus on the positives? Are we so pessimistic that we always tend to see the glass half-empty or is there another mechanism that makes us react this way? The answer is found in the plain phenomenon that we usually take things for granted. Every time we want to evaluate how our lives are going we do not start from the same things over and over again. We do not consider a plus the fact that we can walk or that we are almost completely healthy.

On the other hand, we skip these because we had them forever and we did not obtain them at some point in life. Still, we could just as easily be deprived of the right to enjoy them. Good health is not to be taken for granted. In fact, it exists until a problem appears, because at some point a problem will come up and this applies to everyone. But even when our health is in jeopardy there are things we can consider as positives. For sure, not all of the body collapses in one day. Yet, we will not think of the things that still function well, but we will talk about the problems that have been created.

This is an alarm to wake us up and make us act on the things that are going wrong in order to fix them. A long as this mechanism works as a protector for our well-being this is perfectly fine. However, if this starts making us miserable about our lives and fearful to chase new opportunities we should take a step back to reconsider.

Most of us have been raised with the belief that life is full of problems and in order to live happily in it, we need to be optimistic. Here I talk about a completely different point of view according to which life is full of gifts and in order to live happily, we need to focus on them. The difference between these two approaches is huge. The first one implies that reality sucks and we choose to live in a bubble while the second one says that life is wonderful just the way it is and we just have to open the eyes that nature has given us. Being optimistic is not just a choice; it is the only choice.

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