Positivity

The Tragedy Of Positivity

Garth Beyer

I’m all for staying positive (duh!), but you need to recognize that there are times that being positive blinds you. No, this isn’t about being a positive realist. It’s more about being an active idealist.

I recently sat in on a class filled with first year students. During class, each student expressed how great it was that the teacher’s lecture mimicked exactly what is in the book they had to read. Being positivists, they noted how it really sets the information in their memory. I laughed.

I’ve been in the lecture and I’ve read the book. Not only is the lecture a copy of the book, but the professor goes through the slides so quickly that it’s hard to keep up anyway. Oh, I also need to mention the slides are posted online for the students to view at their leisure.

Bravo to the students for turning a negative into a positive by saying that the repetition of material is beneficial. But shame on them for not changing the professors ideals, not challenging the method of teaching, not suggesting improvements.

Repetition is valuable, but the students can repeat all the information by looking at the slides or rereading the book. When it comes to the lecture, that’s two and a half hours of wasted time.

By all means, stay positive, but be skeptical.

Not all things that are positive should go unchallenged.

 

Stay Positive & Make Things Right, To Your Heart, Not Your Mind

Garth E. Beyer

Self-Destruction And The Need For It

Garth Beyer

Unlike most reality shows, Destroy Build Destroy actually sets an extremely positive theme and lesson for those with an open enough mind to see it: monumental creations can be constructed out of the destruction of almost any object.

Take a look at another example: tattooing.

Tattooing, which is a marvelous form of art – yet at the same time, mutilation – is also creation through destruction. The act of being tattooed is destroying your body, your skin. It involves pain, changing an original form, and there is blood (plenty of it) as proof. Yet, after being tattooed, something artistically intrinsic has been printed on your body. Creation through destruction.

We must pay a price for something to be created through destruction. At times it is money, other times it is emotions, personal attachments, relationships, or claimed sentimental objects.

The concept of creation through destruction is clear. If your mind is still open to this theme, can you imagine a way that the destruction of your self could lead to a creation of something greater?

If this concept can be applied to absolutely any object in the world, why wouldn’t it also apply to us, as humans, as people, as moving, being, emotionally thinking living beings.

Can we be destroyed? Yes. But, can we self-destruct? We’re actually pretty good at it.

The real trouble is making it so our self-destruction leads to creation. Most of the time our self-destruction is just that. We will beat ourselves down, criticize our own work, tell ourselves we are not good enough. We will easily toss out our own work, quickly choose someone else before we choose ourselves, we will consciously toss our time away to unproductive matters.

The destroy part, we have that down pat. The creation part though, can use some work. As humans, metaphorically speaking, when our heads get chopped off – or when we chop them off ourselves – we have the ability to grow two back. That involves creation. That involves different perspectives, an open mind, and an incessant need to learn from our mistakes and everything around us.

Contrary to belief, the world is pretty easy on us, especially if we comply, follow orders, and never make a rumpus. In fact, it’s a smooth operation as long as we don’t try to change anything. It’s for this reason that self-destruction is a necessary process for creation, for art, for growth, and most importantly, for experience.

We can let the destruction of our selves ruin us, or we can create something remarkable from it.

 

Stay Positive & Become Part Of The Tribe Of Fireweeds

Garth E. Beyer

For those who don’t know, fireweeds mainly grow only after a forest fire.

A Conviction For Freedom

Garth Beyer

Forbidden love hovers over the City,
a pink cloud of cherry-kissed sunshine
warming faces who dare glance up
setting themselves free of doom, gloom
dictated lives
lived in dismal corners.

 The speaker of this poem clearly understands that dictated lives carried out in fear make people live in a very dark place, a place absent of happiness, love, sunshine and positivity.

I believe freedom is essential to our lives, it may even be the key to happiness, and is surely the shortcut to success for any individual willing to take the risk for freedom.  But what is freedom? Freedom is the ability to give your love to anything. The ability to see shapes in the clouds and notice the underside of leaves in the wind. The realization of your chance to not be anyone else but yourself. Freedom is the act of becoming more of your self. It is a flexible mind and a heart that never sleeps. Although, to our own demise, there are three things in life holding us back from entering a state of freedom: Traditions, fear, and love. All play large roles holding us back  in our individual paths to sovereignty.

Traditions: They dictate the majority of young people and encompass completely the lives of the elderly. Such as the live to work ethic, ones father worked to live, so he expects that to be passed down his generation. Families seem to force their children into taking their traditions and their lives instead of creating their own path. The other form of the live to work ethic is when ones parents force the life you should live based off the lessons they have learned. In reality, this action is only 5% beneficial because it is vital to take knowledge from those who have more experience but not when it revokes ones ability to choose. The third type of tradition that plays a harsh role in the containment of freedom is religious traditions. They create strict guidelines for the supposedly “proper way of living” which, ironically, are also passed down from parents. It seems that every form of so-called “togetherness” has been in place to force upon traditions that are destroying art, soul, peace and happiness.

Fear: We grow up fearing things, resenting them, avoiding opportunities, avoiding people, and social events. We lose sight of life and at times missing out on it completely. Although it is a long thought on subject, fear often shuts the brain down, turns your shoulder to the best in life and makes you forget why your heart is beating. Everything in life that you do, think, and say, can be narrowed down to either love or fear. Of course, you know which is more common – nearly everything you do is derived from fear. Think about it the next time you do anything in the middle of the day. Ask yourself why you are doing it and continue asking why until you either end up saying that you love it or that you fear something else. After doing this, you will then have a new goal and challenge in life – more love, less fear.

Love: There is a lack of love in everything we do and to who we hold dear. It’s clear by now that it is love that will give you freedom and with freedom, you will be brought happiness through every experience and interaction in life. However, it takes a special minded person to find love in their job and even a more special minded person to find a job they love. Unless you can overcome tradition and fear, you will never find your passion or your freedom. The other form of love that is lacking is the love we have for one another. For example, I was in Barnes & Noble one evening during the winter season. While searching for a book, I heard a mother tell a child to wear his jacket as they were about to leave. The young boy, probably the age of 5 or 6, said he did not want to wear it. “Put your jacket on!” the mother had screamed at him. After further yelling, she forced it on him. There are two options of love and care she could have taken rather than expressing all the negative emotion and resentment towards her son. First, she could have helped the kid into his jacket or could have told him to wear it just until they got to the car. She could have given him options to choose from and build his decision-making skills. The other option was to let a kid be a kid; young and free-spirited. If he doesn’t want to wear it then let him experience the cold. Once he is cold enough he will try to put it on and he will be successful. Of course, this way you will laugh at him because it is inside out and then help him. Isn’t that a greater experience then to just yell at him and chastise him for not doing it right? Pity. The world is deprived of unconditional love, in family, in work and in our selves.

Releasing oneself from tradition, letting go of fear, and creating a flow of unconditional love is the set course for true freedom, and takes us one step closer to world happiness.

 

Stay Positive & Ah Kuta Matata

Garth E. Beyer

To read the full poem of “Breaking Tradition”, click here

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The Tragedy Of A Glass Half Full

Garth Beyer

Sure, the glass can be half full but what is it filled with?

Darren Hardy, Publisher of SUCCESS magazine had posted an article regarding Wolf Blitzer and how he is hurting America. I had no choice but to pull this following segment from his post. Feel free to visit the full article here.

Your mind is like an empty glass. It will hold anything you put into it. You put in sensational news, salacious headlines and talk show rants and you are pouring dirty water into your glass. If you’ve got dark, dismal, worrisome water in your glass, everything you create will be filtered through that muddy mess, because that’s what you’ll be thinking about. Garbage in, garbage out.

You can flush your dirty glass with clean, clear, pure water. What is clear water? Positive, inspirational and supportive input and ideas. Stories of aspiration, people who, despite challenges, are overcoming obstacles and achieving great things. Strategies of success, prosperity, health, love and joy. Ideas to create more abundance, to grow, expand and become more. But it’s a constant battle as we are surrounded by those who want to spew dirty water into our glass constantly.

With that I would like to bring up the solution to the problem by introducing the concept of fasting. while fasting means to abstain from eating, it is better defined as the action of abstaining from [insert anything] for a period of time. In the following personal story, fasting holds true to both drinking and eating. Toward the end of the post, you will be acquainted with mental and social fasting.

A Glass Of Dirty Water

A while ago I was feeling a bit sick. I told my friend that I wasn’t going to eat or drink anything. She asked, “How are you supposed to feel better if you don’t eat anything?” I described how my stomach was like a glass of dirty water. If a glass is already half-way filled with dirty water and you put clean water in it. What do you have?

A glass full of dirty water. Now, you can add as much pure water to the glass as you want and it will overflow but still remain dirty. In my case, I was going to let my stomach get rid of and deteriorate all the stuff that was causing me to feel sick before I would fill it with more food and nourishment.

I used the analogy with my stomach sickness as a vehicle for the glass of water. I rather like Darren Hardy’s direction towards your mind being the glass that is filled with water. I have always loved the idea of a glass half full, it’s the worldwide mark of an optimist. Mistakenly though, I see a countless number of people trying to better themselves but only having more problems. While they have good intentions, they are fighting a losing battle. No matter how much pure, clean and fresh water you put in your glass or how much colorful positive assurance you pour into your mind, you are just adding more to what is already tarnished.

This means that before you can start living a life full of positivity, of a determined attitude and excellence, to truly have a “glass half full” life, you must first empty your glass.

Stay Positive & Start By Destroying Bad Habits

Garth E. Beyer