The Trouble with Positive Thinking

Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking. Many of you have read The Secret by the idea of manifest destiny.

Barbara does a great job of saying how it is difficult to believe that if a Tsunami comes your way, it is because you must have been sending out those vibes to generate waves of destruction.

Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking.

In the world around, you can always try to look for the bright side of things and delude yourself into a mythological narrative or you can let into your heart and head what is real and adapt to your new surroundings. Often when there is no acceptance there is no movement in your life. David Whyte, poet and philosopher helps us understand this idea of faith without the idea of manifest destiny.

Faith

I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

— David Whyte
from Where Many Rivers Meet
©2007 Many Rivers Press

We can have faith that tomorrow will come or we can resist that temptation. Being sunny and positive will not make it happen and you can relax into the idea that tomorrow will be a new day.