A note on positive and negative thinking

On reading these few entries over that I’ve posted today, and thinking about various different conversations I’ve had about positivity and negativity, acceptance, etc, some more thoughts occurred to me.

Sometimes here, what I write probably comes across as complaining. In reality, I’m just telling you what my life is like here. The reality is that it is hard and quite a lot of frustrating things happen. I am more patient and less frustrated these days when these things happen (e.g. did not worry about car breaking down as knew we would get back to Dili somehow) but perhaps that doesn’t come across all of the time.

I do try to stay away from unnecessary negativity (despite various bleating emails and phone calls when I’m feeling sad), but I don’t believe in sugarcoating and I don’t believe in pretending that things are marvellous when they’re not. I *could* say ‘Oh I had a marvellous time interviewing the other day, everything went really well and then the car broke down so I had this wonderful opportunity to sit on the side of the road for two hours’. But that would be an absolute lie and I would sound insane and not myself. Interviewing is rewarding, but difficult, and I don’t always receive the help I need. We were all exhausted and the car hire company mucked us around. My friend missed out on a social engagement she had in the evening.

Sometimes the important part of positivity is not an absence of complaint but the will to keep going.