Closer on DVD, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jude Law and Julia Roberts. The movie made me think about a counterpoint to the idea that we should always strive to be "positive thinkers".
At first I didn't think I was going to be able to sit through a movie that, oddly enough, managed to be both distasteful and boring (you would think one or the other but not both).
I took a nap about half way through and when I woke up, toughed it out, watching to the end.
Which brings me to the point.
I was glad I watched the whole movie even though it made me feel uncomfortable, it also more importantly made me think.
What does that have to do with positive thinking you ask?
Whatever you decide to expose your brain to, it might be best to give it some variety. In the real world there is ugliness, beauty, pain, joy, good, evil and all points in between. What I'm getting at is that to be interesting and interested you may want to be open to exploring.
Personally I wouldn't want to become a namby pamby positive thinking single minded wussy little goodie two shoes. I would want to use parts and pieces of a variety thoughts/writings/teaching that fit into my personal philosophy of what is good, to create my own world view.
The challenge of that "I'm open to exploring" world view is that you need to be anchored somewhere so you don't get blown about and lose course or start to go in circles hopelessly lost; becoming say, a defender of animal rights one day and a member of the NRA the next. Actually those two things might not be contradictory, but I digress.
You need a personal philosophy of what is good. What are your principles? How do you define integrity? Ethics?
As Gandhi G said -
"I do not want my house to be walled in on sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible."
"Let your mind be like a room with many open windows; let the breeze flow in from all of them, but refuse to be blown away by any one."
Mahatma Gandhi
To be human means to be multi-dimensional, complex, contradictory, inconsistent - like the world we live in. Being human, we end up with art, books, articles, speech that may make us uncomfortable or feel off balance, but that's a good thing, assuming we want to move, change and grow. If not we can always find someone to tell us how and what to think, so we don't have to.
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