Have you ever been around someone who seems to light up every room they enter? Everyone around them brightens a little for their presence, and they’re the person to go to when you need help recovering from moments of confusion and despair.
Negativity and positivity work in a perpetual tug-of-war dance that influences every one of us, and every living creature and force of nature is an active participant. When we realize the parts we each play in that larger scheme, we seize the power to influence the natural balance around us.
Manufacturing Light
Everything that occurs in this world is the result of either a motivation or a reaction. Motivations stem from thoughts and feelings that revolve around love, hate, fear, bravery, shame, pride, resentment and reverence. Reactions are typically the results of predictable behaviors stemming from those motivations.
Consider how you might respond to someone giving you a thoughtful, heartfelt gift as opposed to their physically or verbally assaulting you. It’s not hard to imagine how your reaction might reflect (and further fuel) the feelings between you. These positive and negative exchanges are constantly occurring, although the impacts of most are too subtle for us to see immediately. Still, like coins accruing in a jar, their value slowly but surely grows.
We can become manufacturers of light when we realize we have a choice in every exchange to contribute to the positive end instead of the negative one. When we’re scared or angry, do we choose to add fuel to the fire, or do we choose to be vessels of positivity and light despite the setbacks? Bad things happen. No one gets through life without suffering. It’s truly how we approach obstacles during our darkest points that often define our character.
During our hardest times, we can choose to contribute to the world’s happiness, or we can, ourselves, add to its suffering. It is a choice.
Keeping Personal Balance
Just because we ought to strive for positive responses in our interactions doesn’t mean we should never defend ourselves. We must, however, appreciate the gravity of every instance we choose to contribute to the pool of negativity. There are many times when we realize in hindsight how fruitless our anger usually was. We may feel bad about how we reacted, and in some cases, we may even realize we’ve left destructive wakes of our own in the blindness of our fury.
There’s a difference between standing your ground and striking back. One seeks to mitigate personal harm, while the other wants to create it.
We’re all human, and everyone makes mistakes. With that, we must summon the strength to be forgiving of others for also being human. When we learn to approach one another with love, regardless of our differences, real magic is possible. Humanity often has such a difficult time with the concept “live and let live,” but if every one of us found the insight and humility to appreciate the goodness in one another rather than foster the evil we thought we saw, we might actually have a chance at something truly beautiful.
Because really, when it all comes down to it, we can only hold as much hate for others as we harbor individually within ourselves. Actions are fleeting and beliefs are personal, but every human life is sacred. It’s up to each of us to revere the value in one another as well as ourselves. And it’s up to each of us to actively make this world a better place. It happens with every single choice we make.
Paper Shadows 