Seeing the Positve Side of Bad Situations
Sometimes, we get into bad situations which completely throws us off. We often react to those by being angry and feeling sorry for ourselves. For example, the most common thought we go through is, “why me?”. You may feel that you were unlucky, and that life isn’t fair.
Examples of bad situations going from severe to least severe: Natural disasters, illnesses, loved ones’ death, accidents, missing a flight, getting fired, cars breaking down, traffic jam, our website stopped working for a day.
Firstly, I understand just how hard many of these situations are, and am in no way saying that we shouldn’t feel angry or sad about it. However, for our own peace of mind and well being, I would like to suggest alternate ways of thinking that may help you feel less horrible about unfortunate situations.
Sometimes, all it takes is changing our own ways of thinking to feel much happier and luckier, because who knows, you may just realise that something positive came out of that negative experience.
Let me give you some examples:
In 2010, Brisbane was flooded and caused a lot of damage to houses. Without a doubt, many were very upset, especially those with houses that were flooded. However amidst all that, something really gave me hope, and that was the way humans connected and supported each other. It’s times like this we can see how much we care about others. That was the only time when it felt as if almost every neighbour became our friend, someone who we helped, and in return, helped us. usually, people would just go to work and have little time to talk to each other, and yet this moment, we came together like a family and helped each other out.
A less severe example is a couple of days ago, I had bad problems with my hosting, which brought all my websites down for the entire day. Naturally, any webmaster would be annoyed about that, and so was I. However, it was because of this outage that really gave me a chance to work on the Divine Glowing Health logo, which I ended up really loving. I often think that perhaps if my site didn’t go down for the whole day, I would’ve been busy working on other things to do the logo.
Perhaps sometimes, things happen for a reason.
Of course there are certain things in life that’s unfair to the extreme and certainly does not feel like there should be a reason for it, such as innocent people being killed or natural disasters wiping out a large amount of people who do not deserve it. Perhaps we could only have faith, that it will eventually help people become stronger. Sometimes, it’s through these experiences that people learn to be careful and do something actively to protect themselves.
However, there are less severe things that we could easily take small steps in changing the way we think, so we go from raging about how horrible the situation is, how unlucky we are, to perhaps even being thankful.
Always think about whether something positive came out of it.
For example: If you lost a job, perhaps you’re meant to do even greater things in the future that you hadn’t realised yet.
If your family got ill and you missed going somewhere important, think of that as a protection even. I remember reading one story about a guy who just happened to miss going somewhere for a vacation, and turned out that something horrible happened where he was meant to go.
If nothing positive came out right now, perhaps something will happen in the future or perhaps it happened without you even realising.
Another example: You had a very bad relationship breakup and feel extremely depressed, it’s affecting you so much that you can’t sleep or eat well. However, perhaps there’s an even more special person waiting for you in the future, and this had to happen for you to take the first steps into allowing that better future.
In life, we have to experience the bad to appreciate the good. At least, I feel that if we met someone nasty, we would realise just how rare a kind person is. If we haven’t truly starved, we’d never realise that even a grain of rice is precious.
