Being Alive-Polarity of the Positive and Negative

In the four years that my team and I have been posting blog posts, I’ve noticed a strange trend—posts about sad or difficult things tend to get WAY more attention than posts about successes and joys. In a similar vein, posts about something that scares or disturbs people gets more interaction than posts that are unremittingly positive. 

My preference is to focus on the positive, but I also don’t want to live in a place where I deny that anything bad happens. It does, every day. People struggle with all kinds of dramas and traumas. And I have to admit the scary or bad catches our attention like nothing else. Someone is thrilled and happy—that is genuinely wonderful, but we know they’re okay and doing well. When someone is struggling or scared, our immediate desire is to help in some way. This desire is not bad—it’s actually good, that humanity still has a desire to reach out and help—but it does mean that our media (whether social or the traditional press) has a strong tendency toward presenting the big, bad or scary elements, with the positive triumphs de-emphasized. We want attention, after all, and the big-bad-and-scary is so much more attention grabbing. It gives us a strong, visceral reaction that lasts for a very long time. The positive doesn’t linger as long. Is the dramatic/traumatic truly more prevalent? No, it’s just more attention grabbing. 

We can try to explain the whys and wherefores of this tendency, but in the end, it’s a reality that we all have to live with—the big-bad-and-scary is very much a part of the human experience. Does it mean we have to live in it ALL the time? No. But it can be one of the most valuable experiences we have and an incredibly powerful way to connect with someone quite strongly. Everyone of us has a story of tough times and difficulties. I’ve certainly had my share. From the loss of my mother and my husband when I was twenty six, to the internal changes and dramas I’ve gone through since then, I find that all of the tough times in my life have given me an incredible internal strength that has allowed a childhood dream to come true—I am now a published writer who has two books under her belt and another one on the way. Would this have occurred even if I hadn’t had drama and tragedy in my life? Maybe. Maybe not. It certainly has given my stories depths that they simply did not have when I was a teenager who had not yet experienced the full range of what was possible. 

The old hoary adage “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” really is true. It’s a part of human experience, human growth and development. We go through the tough times, and if we can remember to see how every one of these things that happen to us connect us with other people who have gone through something similar, if we let these dramas teach us how to see our own internal strength, if we see how everything that happens to us is here to help us in some way—well, after that, big-bad-and-scary becomes nothing more than a place to remember our own tough moments and to extend some compassion to our fellow beings. We are here, after all, to experience everything life can offer us—and being truly alive means being alive to everything from big-bad-and-scary to openhearted joy. Compassion is built by what we’ve lived through, if we give it a chance—I don’t want to live in tragedy and drama all the time, but I am very grateful for the depths of compassion I’ve learned from those things I have experienced, even as I celebrate the joys and triumphs that populate my life. We ARE everything and that is the miracle of being alive.