OH, FOR A POSITIVE THOUGHT!

I am a person of many questions. Even things that seem very straightforward engender questions in my mind. I read something and invariably will find some tiny smidgeon of information that seems sitting there waiting to have a question raised about it.

Here’s an example. I just this week read an article about cultivating a positive outlook in everyday life. Now to be explicit, the article was a recap of a lunch-time presentation by a female Ph.D. at Loma Linda University. It didn’t go into great detail about what she said but here is what got me: “Living in an age of anxiety, it is easy to incorporate negative thoughts into routine activities. She showed some research results revealing that an average of 40,000 thoughts run through the human brain each day. It is estimated that nearly 80% of those thoughts are negative.”

I looked at that and blinked. 40,000 thoughts a day? Is that possible? If a person sleeps 8 hours a night, that gives them 16 hours a day in which to have those 40,000 thoughts (assuming that what goes through one’s mind at night via dreams doesn’t count as thoughts). And to get that number down to a workable concept, that is 2500 thoughts an hour, of which 2,000 (80%) of them are negative. Or 33 negative thoughts a minute.

No wonder people go to bed tired every night. Perhaps we go to bed and to sleep because the burden of all those negatives thoughts cause us to be depressed.

According to the article, she says the main thing in life is not to worry.

Let’s see, somehow we have to come up with 33 happy or good things to think about per minute in order to get rid of negativity in our lives. Well, if you can do that you are a better person than I am. Taking full charge of your thoughts is the only way it can be done. No more of this random or unconscious thinking. You and I must make sure, before we think it, that whatever is coming down the pipe heading toward becoming a thought will have to be good.

Oh, this kind of stuff is just too tiring to think about.

I once knew a fellow who believed that all the Bible required for believing anything God had for us was to act as if it was already done. As the world was preparing for an overseas Olympics, this fellow felt that he wanted to go there and witness for the Lord. Now as it happened, he had previously been married but he wanted to be available for the Lord’s work, which he felt precluded his having a job. So he quit his job, divorced his wife and let Welfare take care of her and their two children while he “did the Lord’s work.” He solicited funds from Christian acquaintances to finance his venture, but they didn’t quite see it the way he did. But he was sure that God was going to provide, so he made his reservation on a LA to Europe flight. On the day he was to leave, he drove into L.A., went up to the counter and asked the clerk if his ticket had been paid for yet. The clerk said said no – and my friend said to her “My father was sending the money.” When the plane took off without him, he figured God just had some other plan for him.

Now I say all this because I never have and never will think it is possible to change much just by positive thinking. I know this Loma Linda lady says, ‘Don’t worry.” All well and good to say, but to try to unconsciously substitute a positive thought every time a negative thought comes toward my mind somehow seems to be exactly the kind of process my friend went through.

And at any rate, I wonder how it is this lady (or whoever) came up with a way to measure how many thoughts go through a brain in a day. And how can it be determined if a thought, which might only be “fleeting,” is positive or negative.

I try not to think complicated thoughts. I do, however, have a lot of thoughts that need answers. Jerry rarely crawls into bed at night before I tell him I have to ask him a question, something I’ve been thinking about. He is patient, which is good because that doesn’t disturb my positive to negative thought ratio. Once in a while he snores before I get to ask the question, so I simply save it for the next night. And instead of being aggravated that he is able to fall asleep so quickly and not have all these questions in his mind, I smile and am thankful that at least one of us can fall asleep so quickly.

Now THAT is a positive thought!