Accentuate the Positive

The importance of maintaining a positive outlook has been coming at me from a lot of directions lately. JL Wilson remarks on it today: http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2006/04/aside.html

A friend of mine who had been burdened with anxiety disorder went on Zoloft last month and has started seeing the benefits. He describes how things that once seemed like chores are more like pleasures now. In my own life, I have seen anxiety and depression turn things into misery when the same things are joyous privileges when I am on medication.

I am reading “The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls, the story of her childhood with lunatic parents. In reality, the woman would have been better off raised by wolves. Her parents weren’t abusive; just hideously neglectful and unstable. Walls describes her ordeal in a matter of fact tone, without bitterness, and her maintenance of a positive attitude seems to me to have made her life bearable. Her telling of the story in such a positive way makes it bearable for the reader.

I struggle to keep a positive outlook, to accept with gratitude what God has granted me. I am resigned to cultivating my garden, as Voltaire suggests, but I do not yet reckon that I live in the best of all possible worlds.

The key for me is to know when being positive is simply delusional and counterproductive, even counterrevolutionary. Kevin Carson sometimes problematizes management books that encourage mindless and joyful obedience in workers:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-on-moron-fish-philosophy.html
Certainly, if you are stuck in a crappy job with a crappy boss, it may make sense to try to make the best of it, but taking pleasure in blind obedience to authority for its own sake seems pathological in itself.

The mega-church preacher and author Joel Osteen, whose soporific and mesmerizing voice is almost irresistible, preaches joyful obedience. I sometimes catch Osteen as I am channel surfing, and I find him fascinating. I do a pretty good Osteen impression, if I say so myself. If I remember right, he preached this weekend: “You don’t have to go work; you get to go to work.” He had a whole litany of things that we should be grateful for and see as privileges rather than burdens. Mrs Vache Folle piped up with her addition: “You don’t have to have head lice; you get to have head lice.”

On one level, Osteen is right. We should be less ungrateful and more appreciative of our many blessings. We should make the best of our situation until we can change it. But it is too easy to fall into the trap of condemning all criticism and complaint and discontent as subversive and selfish.

I recall Bill Gothard's program in my youth in which I was instructed that any unhappiness I felt was a manifestation of selfishness, that I was responsible for my own feelings and should neither complain nor try to change things. My own pastor used the word "bullshit" to describe how he felt about this teaching.

In the West Indies, folks often referred to the concept of “negativity” as something that impeded progress. It was “negativity” that caused initiatives to fail, and one could sometimes successfully shut down criticism by playing the “negativity” card. (One calypso singer turned this on its head in 1999 with her song “Are You Positive”, which referred to HIV, a case where “negativity” was desirable.)

When I first got treatment for anxiety and depression, I went on Prozac. It cured my symptoms, but it also changed my personality and made me hyper-complacent. Nothing bothered me. I could have sold insurance and voted GOP on Prozac. I had no poetry left in me, no sense that the world was broken, no courage to let my heart break. Zoloft, for me, allows me to treat endogenous anxiety and depression without becoming too unfeeling.

I aim to be happy in as much as I can be, to take pleasure in the many aspects of life that are pleasurable, to be grateful for the many gifts with which I have been endowed. To that end, let me eschew envy, greed, and ingratitude. But I want to be open to heartbreak, to poetry, to an awareness that all is not as it seems and that all is not right with the world. There is a happy medium between living in a constant state of agitation due to all the evil and stupidity in the world and embracing the evil and stupidity.