Let the Good Times Roll

It’s weird how like attracts like. It’s weird how once we start focusing on Good, we start seeing it everywhere. It’s weird to be allowed to paint everything, even long broken relationships or dysfunctional patterns, with a new coat of paint. I’m not saying that if you paint a jalopy a different shade of red, it will start running and looking like a Ferrari, but I am very confused by the effectiveness of just aiming Good at other people and situations and making room for magic.

Louise Hay writes about patterns in her book You Can Heal Your Life. I have a complicated relationship with individualism and autonomy. We, as Americans, are big proponents of bootstraps and DIY, including in the therapeutic world, but that whole mantra was kind of constructed by white, privileged, pretty selfish and broken men, and has led to a similarly broken, selfish culture. So, I am wary of solutions that lay every problem at the foot of the individual. Just change your outlook and everyone changes. Yeah, right. My BLEEP.

That being said, the pessimist in any of us sort of refuses to believe that there is good all around us, just lying in wait. It refuses to see how much we are loved or wanted or appreciated. As soon as we change that mantra, and focus on the distinct possibility that we are lovable and loving and worthy of all good things, the really good BLEEP starts cropping up everywhere. Not necessarily because God has made it so, but because it was there all along and we just refused to see it.

Think about that, good and hard, all day if you have to. It will do you a world of Good.