Positive Thinking: Not for the Faint of Heart

Dec 24

I wrote a book.

For July 2020 – remember that? Full-on pandemic and the world in lockdown? — I moved to the cabin on the back of our pond and sat down to make a gift of everything Wide Open Writing has learned over our years of writing and running writing retreats. We couldn't travel, I reckoned, but we could still write. And so I wrote almost every word of the book that month as every WOW staff person was virtually at my back whispering in my ear and putting words in my fingers for the entire time. That was a fine form of collaboration, as it turned out as if we were tossing our thoughts into a common stream and letting the stream become the story. I stood at the mouth of the flowing stream and caught stories as they came to me, and eventually, there was a book.

So it was like that, water streaming through my hands. It was also like birth. Whose, I am not entirely sure. Was I birthing or being born? After years of gestation, it was like birthing in that these words had never before been placed in this particular order, and in that, what emerged was of me and yet not entirely created by me. Also, it was hard, possibly harder than capturing droplets of water from a rushing stream. And yet, it was as if I was being born anew as well. There's a palpable and important difference between knowing something and claiming that something. Like this: In a circle of people who've gathered to write together in the Tuscan hills or a Moroccan souk or at the edge of an Arizona desert or in a park in Washington DC, how many of us will raise our hands when the question is asked: Who here is a writer? Regrettably, not so many.

I had written forever since before I had full command of the alphabet. Sometimes as a child, I copied my favorite fairy tales and pretended I had made them up. That was a shameful secret for a time, but now I call it practice. And yet, did I claim to be a writer? Almost never. But here I was, offering to scribe the story of Wide Open Writing, and in the process requiring that I become clear not only about that story but also about what I and we fundamentally believe about creativity, its sources, and its nutritional requirements. I asked of myself that I claim the writer in me, without disclaimers, and in the process, birthing this book gave birth to the writer in me in ways I had not known to expect.

Writing this particular book also asked me to put myself fully behind the words I was called to write. At the core of Wide Open Writing's magic combination of beliefs and practices is our relentless focus on positivity and expansiveness. And I use the word magic intentionally here to refer to the alchemy of the life of a WOW writing retreat somehow reliably emerging as a greater phenomenon than the sum of its parts.

I've wanted for a while to write a blog piece about this notion of positivity and how crucial it is to embracing and enhancing creativity. The following paragraphs are excerpted from the book, Wide Open Writing: Embrace Your Creative Genius, specifically from the chapter called Positivity. They're designed to give you a pretty good sense of where we're coming from in our approach to writing retreats. But there's more.

More than a few early readers of the book said something like this: "This is not just a book about writing. It's a book about how to live!" That was both surprising and delightful, and it struck me as a testimony to the truth of what we're doing when we set out to create writing retreats or workshops or online Sunday sessions: We're inviting others to find and follow the creative streams in their lives, and we're doing that because we believe creativity might save us all.

Turning toward what is positive is most relevant not only in our writing or our painting or our music but in our whole precious lives, and that's why I want to share this piece with you today. Positivity is not easy, and it is not for the faint of heart. Right now, my dearest friend is very ill, my extended family is experiencing hardships I can't fix, the pandemic is strangely morphing around the world again and again and again, collectively we teeter on what feel like smaller and smaller islands of safety, and we're so very tired. It's easiest to go dark. But I am comforted with the thought that together we are capable of turning again and again toward the light. I believe this is what we are all always trying to do.

Margaret Mead suggests that we "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." And this, I propose, is how.

POSITIVITY

“We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic and positive equals unrealistic.”

— Susan Jeffers

Our brains have evolved to scan for problems. If we catch a glimpse of that saber-toothed tiger heading our way, our well-adapted brains have us on the run or brandishing swords before we've even thought about it. Fight, flight or freeze, and thus, survive. It's an excellent strategy in the short run. Our myelinated neurons – myelin being the super-speed reactivity component of our neural structures, the special sauce that creates reaction before we've even caught up with the action we're reacting to – have kept us safe for centuries. But. When we look at the entire world, at our writing, for instance, through a myelinated lens, we will usually feel like something is wrong.

Our brains don't waste their energy keeping track of what's right. Consider the long-term romantic relationship in which those tiny lovely things that used to mean so much now pale in relation to the unpleasant weight of the unwashed dishes, the dirty socks on the floor, and that habit s/he has of eating pretzels in bed. It's an adaptation. We zero in on threats.

Similarly, because the threat is at the core of our neurochemical navigation systems, we learn to think critically. At the most fundamental level, our brains operate on binary, no-yes processes. Threat or Safety. Criticism or Appreciation. Fear or Love. We learn that judging is safer than appreciating. We learn to appreciate negativity for the ways it saves us from physical, social, and emotional danger. Our chemical survival strategies of self-protection activate as we naturally avoid what is likely to hurt and approach what we expect to help. But here's the kicker for any creative artist: When self-protection is activated, risks become dangerous, and creativity comes to a halt.

"Just as water lilies retract when sunlight fades, so do our minds when positivity fades," is the poetic conclusion drawn by a group of social psychology researchers who compared creative output after seeing images of fear/anger vs. joy/contentment.

In the generative world of WOW's writing retreats, we're interested in getting past self-protection networks in favor of self-actualization, where creativity, joy, and aliveness soar. And we've learned some things about how to do that.

“Learning to take in the good is like fully and mindfully breathing in life: It allows us to access our inner strengths, vitality, creativity, and love.”

— Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Yes, our brains are hard-wired for negativity. But we can change that. In the words of Suzanne Kingsbury, founder of a beautiful writing method called Gateless, "When we don't focus on what is wrong, it falls away." Imagine that. Imagine the radical shift this could make in our minds, in our relationships, in our culture, in our educational systems. Imagine what will happen in any of these realms when we focus not on calling out errors but on affirming grace, beauty, and power. Now that we aren't in physical danger, at least during our writing retreats, we can learn to access and expand and eventually live in the higher intelligence of positivity. That is the core of Wide Open Writing's mission. None of us has yet graduated to living in a mind of steady-state positivity. Still, everything we're learning about neuroanatomy and overall wellness reminds us that this positivity is where it's at. And it is undoubtedly where good writing lives.

“Research is beginning to reveal that positive thinking is about much more than being happy or displaying an upbeat attitude. Positive thoughts can actually create real value in your life and help you build skills that last much longer than a smile.”

— James Clear, HuffPost

Let's get to writing.

Consider your own experiences (or those of a character you're interested in) of being greeted with positivity or negativity, of praise or criticism. Tell a story about one or more of those experiences. What did you learn about yourself, about life?

Write for 30 minutes, and when you've finished writing, please read on below before you read this writing aloud.

Now it's time to practice positive thinking and feedback about your work. Is there a role for critical thinking? Absolutely. Is it sometimes helpful, even crucial, to have a clear-eyed gaze on where a project could be more robust, where the author could develop skill in the use of description or in creating a mesmerizing arc of the story? No question. But these practices of crafting and fine-tuning are for use in the later developmental stages of our writing. The difference between Michelangelo's work as a sculptor and ours as writers is that we have no block of marble to chip away at until we string a number of words on a page! And for this work of creating marble out of thin air, profoundly positive thinking is required.

We'd like you now to read that piece aloud to yourself and make a note:

What surprises you? ( specific words or phrases, images, energy)

What moves you?

What do you love about what you wrote?

What quality of your writing in general that you see reflected here has excitement or energy for you?

Anything else?

If you can't find anything you loved about what you just wrote, we can almost promise you it's not about the writing. And that's okay. Every one of our WOW facilitators has her and his own struggles with positivity. We've been well-trained, and we have agile self-protection systems in place which caution us against getting too big for our britches, getting a swelled head, getting too big in any way. As if there's something terrible about our inborn radiance.

If you didn't find anything you loved, go back through the piece and find something anyway, something you might love if you were allowed to be positive. Fake it till you make it is a legitimate place to begin and to continue practicing until it becomes real. We can, and do, change our brains continually, and sometimes – like right now – we can choose to change them in a powerfully positive direction.

If you assume there is goodness and value in all of your behavior, and if you consciously look for that goodness, you will see it.

Let's take a few minutes for three short writes: Take two or three minutes to write about something or someone it is easy for you to like. Pause.

When that feels complete, choose something relatively neutral in your world – a carpet, a fork, something you don't ordinarily pay much attention to – and take time to write toward what you can genuinely like about that neutral object. Pause again.

And finally, take a bit more time to write, what do your friends or loved ones like about you? Be specific about experiences, moments, actions that come to mind. Let yourself go beyond "they like me because I'm nice."

Come back to Tara Brach's quote at the start of this chapter and notice how it strikes you now. Notice that she uses the word learning -- "Learning to take in the good…" -- because she assumes that we are all innocent amateurs at this skill. We may have been taught that negativity is more intelligent and practical than positivity, and this is simply untrue. We may have silenced our voices of enthusiasm, idealism, and love for the world in favor of clever discernment. But this will need to change. You may congratulate yourself, for real, on your willingness to cross the threshold with us into the brave, expansive and magical practice of positivity. Really. Congratulate yourself.

Wide Open Writing

“We believe that getting away and connecting to nature and ourselves is central to the creative process. In this place of respite, we find our deeper truths. We purposely choose evocative settings where your adventurous spirit can come out to play with curiosity and wonder. Whether it’s desert or mountains, tropics or tundra, there’s always something sparkly to be discovered.”