Negative thinking requires prophecy

I am a veteran and former negative thinker. I used to find something negative to think about every day. Decades of introspection, therapy, support groups and tons of reading got me to this point: I am agnostic about everything. Not just God. Everything.

When people think of the word, "agnostic", they think that it means neither believing or disbelieving in God. We can be agnostic about anything. There have been serious debates about the nature of reality, what is real and the meaning of life. Humans have pondered the purpose of their existence since at least the dawn of recorded history.

I'm not a big fan of prophets. Maybe it's just me, but prophets really dig negative outcomes. Just ask Nostradamus. Seems like everything he predicted was negative, bad or just plain awful. Where are the positive prophets? But for me, negative thinking and prophecies go together.

I found, at least for me, negative thinking comes from my predictions about outcomes. In my distant past, everything had a negative outcome and that meant I wasn't going to get what I wanted. I was attached to the outcome and it was all negative. I even figured out that happiness isn't getting everything you want. It's knowing what to do when you don't.

I found that once I was able to let go of the predictions, to be willing to watch the world turn without me trying to impose my will upon it, I was happier. This may sound like a shameless pitch, but it's not - if you read some of my earlier blog articles, you'll see this in my writing.

I do what do I do not to make things happen. I do what I do to see what happens next. And if I'm not making predictions about what will happen next, my mind is open to the possibilities. To do just that, I must accept everything exactly the way it is, without reservation. I tend to have better days that way.

It is this sort of detachment, a way of using the lightest touch on the day, that I find I have better days, too. Years ago, I learned something from scientists: you cannot observe an experiment without having some sort of influence on the outcome. To put it differently, just by observing an event, you can influence the outcome.

If that is so, then what we are thinking can have an influence on the events we witness. This is true down to the way we choose to think about an event. The words we use in our mind act as a filter for reality because words are simply abstractions for reality. The word "flower" doesn't even come close to describing a flower, because complexity is built into the universe. You can't even know everything there is to know about say, a chair. The universe comes on a need to know basis.

So I use the lightest possible touch as I move about my world. I'm quiet in the morning to let everyone else sleep. I close doors gently, even when people are awake. I'm gentle with my possessions, the people I love, the people I know, everyone I interact with. I use the lightest possible touch with everyone to see who they are with minimal influence on my part. I use the lightest possible touch with everything I own because it is all a gift.

And the moment I realize that it is all a gift, who am I to predict a negative outcome?