Accentuating the Positive in Our Lives

In today's blog I want to "accentuate the positive." In the '40's, during the time of WWII, Johnny Mercer wrote the Lyrics to the song, "Accentuate The Positive." (As it is a copyright infringement to quote any part of a song, you may access the words here: "http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/paul/lyrics/bingcrosby/accent~1.html") As that was a time of war, life was very stressful. One can still hear this song being played occasionally.

We are again in very stressful times. Our current version of this positive life philosophy is the movement of committing, "random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty." If you want evidence that this is actually a verifiable "movement", you need only do a web search on it. According to my search, in 1982, writer and peace activist Anne Herbert scrawled the suggestion, "practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty" on a place mat in a Sausalito, California, restaurant.

During this current time we regularly hear reports of, seemingly, random acts of senseless violence. As I write this, there was just a news announcement of a woman killing two of her coworkers. As is the nature of "News" reporting, we are given the bad news, seemingly without fail. Nonetheless, there have been an endless string of these "senseless" occurrences in recent years.

In 1993, Chuck Wall, a professor at Bakersfield College, also in California, heard a radio report of "another random act of senseless violence" and urged his human-relations students to perform a "random act of senseless kindness." Interestingly, for me, both these phrases had been combined in my mind as, "Random acts of kindness and senseless acts of generosity." It took looking it up, to discover that there were two different progenitors.

Another version of this is "banking" good deeds. The philosophy behind this, I suspect, is that of Karma, and/or "what goes around, comes around." There are many people who have not heard of, or do not believe in, Karma, who do believe in "Pay Back".

A friend of mine, from years back, once said, "Out of the blue," more or less, "I don't have to wait for another lifetime, things come back to me right away." She was speaking of negative actions of hers, where she received almost immediate "pay back."

The idea of "banking" good deeds has been around for a long time. The main idea is that of performing acts of kindness or generosity, for no particular reason, except that, maybe, those good deeds might help to cancel out, other, negative deeds we may commit in the future.

I have written previously about Ruth Montgomery's experiment of consciously thinking positive thoughts, about someone she had formerly considered an enemy, for a short period of time, about a week as I recall. The results astounded her in that her former enemy, for whom the feeling was mutual, upon their next meeting greeted her as a long-lost friend.

For some reason, we humans seem very susceptible to "catch" behavior. For example, if someone buys the next person in line's cup of coffee, or pays for the meal of a stranger who is in the same restaurant, generally the recipient will pass it on to the someone else, if not immediately, then later on. The general idea of this has been around in the form of buying someone at a bar a drink, but this has been, frequently, an effort to meet that other person. The idea of these acts of kindness/generosity is that there is no ulterior motive, other than, perhaps, "banking good deeds."

One way I practice this when in traffic is to allow someone who hasn't been able to get into a line of traffic, and it is safe, to slow down and allow them space to enter. Frequently, drivers are now not using their turn signals. I read some time ago, that, in New Jersey I think it was, drivers consider using turn signals as tantamount to giving information to the enemy." There are currently too many examples of "road rage," which is also catching. Another aspect of this positive contagion is anonymity, so I will not talk about other acts of mine.

We are all connected unconsciously, as I have stated before. If we strive to remember this in our daily actions, we can not only make life better for ourselves, but for other people as well. This is a contagion that seems to be getting passed around very rapidly in this country today. I want to support this movement, and urge you, as an experiment, to try it out.

I have written here about one's attitude. If you are wondering what steps you might take to change your attitude in ways that are positive, and, in the process, change your life, (create a more positive reality for yourself) this is a good place to start.

I end today's blog.

Shirley Gallup