Looking on the bright side dispels many fears

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday June 9th, 2008

The difference between a weed and a flower is intent.

This is a fact that I believe deep down in the bottom of my heart. Have you ever really stopped to look at a dandelion? Have you ever driven by a field of bright, vibrant, sun drenched dandelions, the fluffy clouds floating overhead as the radio beats time to the road noise?

They are honestly a very pretty flower.

I found something blue growing in my backyard which I am almost certain would not have been there if I had ever got around to mowing it. It was very pretty and I decided to dig it up and stick it in the corner of our flower garden. This could in fact justify my whole "not mowing the back for such an extended period of time" behaviour -- the flowers are that nice.

I am choosing to call this act of random transplanting "recycling". For the record, my wife says they are "forget-me-nots," which is funny because I originally wrote that they were pink and then went home and checked; they are blue -- and curiously forgettable.

Now just so we are clear, I am not writing this column about gardening, and I am not writing this column about recycling, I am not even writing it about my lack of lawn care incentive. Instead I am working on a variation of the theme "bloom where you're planted."

We've all heard that, have we not? It is a short form way of saying we should make the most of wherever we find ourselves; or a long way to repeat the Boy Scout motto "Do your best".

Rarely, however, do we apply it to the way we view the world.

What I want to talk about is the fact that not only is the glass half full; there is probably a pitcher of refills.

When you look at those dandelions, do you see a weed or a flower? When you see the rain falling are you angry you can't go golfing or do you find an old pair of rubber boots and jump in the puddles?

When you stop to think about it, attitude is 90 per cent of everything that happens to us. The easiest route to happiness therefore, is through a change in attitude.

I am a big advocate of re-framing situations so that what seems like a negative can be made into a positive. This can be done for almost everything from weather to sickness. I am not a Pollyanna type of person, trust me. I don't think that everything is wonderful and there is no pain, quite the opposite. I find that there is so much pain in the world that we should celebrate each and every pain free second we get.

To put these two thoughts together, I think that life is meant to be understood as a worthwhile journey filled with opportunity -- and what often gets in our way is the perception that it is "too" painful, or "too" scary for us to handle; and then we begin to expect the worst, and approach everything fearfully, and actually look for the negative instead of the positive; which is the quickest way to find it.

Take the "War on Terror", or the "Environmental Crisis", as examples of negative stereotyping which seem to force us to see the world through dark glasses. There is a very real need to communicate information, and there is a very real need to make people aware that things have to change, but is change best accomplished by fear?

It has never been my experience that scaring people for the purpose of motivation is a good idea. There are a whole lot of folk sayings which back me up: "You get more flies with honey than vinegar" or "better the carrot than the stick," to cite two.

And yet, America chooses to use sacrificial rhetoric about punishing the oppressors as a cause for war instead of moving towards saying that we need to make the world safer.

Media and experts spend their time telling us that our children are all going to die of starvation instead of encouraging us to grow our own food. New Brunswick is thinking about carbon taxes to offset our bad behaviour instead of tax credits for buying a hybrid.

Why does public policy assume that nothing is going to change and that disaster is the only natural outcome?

Why have we changed to a "stick" way of motivating people?

In essence this just disempowers us and makes us capable of bad judgements.

The cynical side of me says that we as a people are easier to control if we are afraid. We are certainly more willing to spend money on big ticket items like military spending and border security. Which will neither make us safer nor more secure.

As an aside I have lived beside quite a few border entries in my time and always find it funny that beefing up security means more guards at the waypoint when all you have to do is walk half a kilometre away and walk through the woods, but I digress.

My point is that more solutions are found by approaching things from a positive fashion, Thomas Edison made thousands of faulty light bulbs and it was because he believed it was possible that it finally worked.

Or as Monty Python put it in their movie, The Life of Brian, "Always look on the bright side of life. . ."