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Our life is a blank canvas. A tabula rasa—A clean slate begging to be filled with meaning and words. Our life is a plain white sheet of paper and we can draw anything we want on it. Sometimes, however, we draw but forget to look at the drawing. We forget to appreciate it, to see the beauty of it. Sometimes, we forget to love it.

Sometimes we see only the negative space left up, and ignore the colour filled up in the positive space. 

At times like this, we need to refocus, to realign our viewpoint and concentrate on what is there instead of what isn’t. 

How to alter your mindset for a more positive life? How to focus on the colour instead of the white blankness surrounding it?

Practice Kindness

Kindness is not some from of inherent virtue that you just have. It’s not something you’re born with. Babies don’t think before the eat mind, just as they don’t think before they stomp a foot on an innocent spider. Babies don’t know what’s right or wrong. They learn it. They grow up with the knowledge of morality as their surroundings and their families provide them with the values. Kindness is a virtue, but it’s not one you don’t have to learn. 

Kindness is much like hope. Like life. It has to be cultivated and nurtured by gentle, warm hands. It has to be planted in soil rich with love and perseverance and dedication. It doesn’t just grow out of nowhere. It has to be watered daily, pruned and praised. It has to be fought for.

Kindness is something you have to practice, something you need to hold on to even when the world tries with all its might to snatch it out of your hands. Much like hope, kindness has to be worked upon. 

You need to work hard, you need to be brave, and you need to trust in yourself and in the universe. Only then can you glow with the kindness inside of you that changes the world, little by little.
It’s the little acts of love that save people, after all. It’s helping the strangers on the street and taking a lost child to its parents  and a kind word to a colllegue. It’s laughter with friends and listening to family and trying to understand others.

It’s kindness that buries itself in small crooks of the sidewalk and behind counters of old shops that hand out free candies to you after a really long day. It’s a bit of hope and a bit of faith in a hopeless, helpless world. 

Practice kindness, practice it daily, like a lesson to be learned, like homework, like a skill you spend hours to master. Be kind to others and be kind to yourself. Be the hope you find in others. Be the brave blob of positivity in a bleak, battered world. 

Pessimism seems so practical sometimes. So snarky and confident and cool. 

There is a dark sort of satisfaction in resignation. Why bother pretending? Why even lie that everything will turn out fine when there are people dying and people suffering and people living not knowing what life is meant to be?
But isn’t that all the more reason to keep hoping? Isn’t that all the more reason to keep persevering and keep holding on the little bit of good we’ve got left. 

Surround Yourself With Positivity 

A flower blooms only where it gets the right air and water. If it doesn’t bloom in a garbage can, you don’t blame the flower, but it’s surroundings.

Environmental is everything. If you’re surrounded by people who degrade and belittle you, that’s all you’ll ever do to yourself too. If you surround yourself with those who believe in you and uplift you and support you, then you’ll find yourself believing in yourself. 

It’s upto you to chose. Limit your exposure to things and people that have a negative influence on you. 

Engage In Hobbies

Find what interest you and then pursue it. Even if it’s not in a professional sense, pursue it for your pleasure, for your soul and satisfaction.

Find interests and hobbies that bring out the creativity in you and give you an overall holistic growth. Just like academics and jobs and career planning is important, this is also important to give food to your soul and keep it active. 

If we don’t engage in any hobbies or creativity, life will get boring very soon. 

There’s a reason why children are the happiest. There’s a reason we miss childhood most when we outgrow it. It’s because childhood is the one phase of life when there’s no stress and hardly any negativity.

It’s because in childhood, we used to do things just for the fun of them, just because they made us happy. We played because it was the best thing in the world to do, we painted, we read, we crafted birthday cards out of paper and watched as they brought smiles to our loved ones eyes.

We had favourites and interests. We had all the time in the world to let them develop into passions and professions, but right now, they were fun. Just fun.

Find some fun in life. Everything else will start looking like fun too, in time.

Be Grateful

You can do an exercise. Take a pen and a paper and make a list of all the things that you have that you are thankful for. Make a list of everything and everyone you have that you couldn’t possibly live without. Make a list of all the things you’ve got that you’ve never valued so much before but that make up a massive portion of your life.

Make a list of everything you love. 

Now ask yourself if you’ve ever been thankful for them before? If you’ve ever taken a minute to enjoy them and feel happy just because you have them? Ask yourself if you’ve told the people you love how much they men’s to you? 

Chances are that you’ve not. We’re not terrribly sentimental, actually, and these things get lost in the busy lifestyles and hectic schedules and easy routines. Our regard and gratitude often gets lost in translation.

Often enough, we take these things for granted. We don’t see their value and then we complain about the never ending suffering arthat life is. We intentionally ignore the positive and then complain about all the negative. 

But like a painting, life has to have both. There’s both the negative space and the positive space. It’s up to you what you focus. It’s up to you to acknowledge the positive space and appreciate it and feel grateful for it. 

Look for the good in life.

Read about them. Watch movies about them. Watch documentaries. Look for them on the streets, in your house, in your brain. Look for them, and find them and remember them. The positive things. 

Force yourself to acknowledge the positive things in life. This doesn’t mean that you have to turn a blind eye to all the negatives. No pigeon got any far by closing both eyes and pretending the cat wasn’t there. No pigeon survived on illusions, no matter how safe they sound.

Focusing on the positive doesn’t mean staying ignorant of the negative. It just means that you are willing to acknowledge that life is full of bath and that it’s never a choice between the two. All life is about is balance. 

Find this balance. Observe the positivity of life and you will soon find yourself embracing it.

If you liked this post, also check out How to battle Black and White thinking.