Bruce Feiler, best selling author and father of two, was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. Worried about his daughters, he asked six of his friends to form a “Council of dads” to help guide the girls through their lives.
After learning the news, I stumbled home, lay down on my bed, and imagined all the ways my life would change. Then my girls came running in, laughing, giggling and falling to the ground. I crumbled. I kept imagining all the ballet recitals I wouldn’t see, the boyfriends I wouldn’t scowl at, the aisles I wouldn’t walk down. Mostly I worried that my girls would miss my voice. Three days later I awoke with an idea of how to give them my voice. I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to form a “Council of Dads.” And I asked each of the men to convey a different message to my girls: How to travel, how to live, how to dream.
And on the surface I thought there might be something to that thesis, so I was curious what her angle would be. Especially in a time when people are popping antidepressants like M&Ms. But it never became clear to me what she really meant by positive thinking (“mandatory optimism and cheerfulness”). The deceiving spinning of facts, politics in a bubble of yes-men, willful ignorance to survive in the corporate workplace, delusions, the mantra of embracing disease to overcome it… it’s all thrown on one pile. And she planted the flag.
I’m not advocating gloom and pessimism, or negativity or depression, those can also be delusional. I mean you can go around making up a story that everything you undertake is going to fail…My very radical suggestion is realism.
A rather hollow suggestion from a selfproclaimed cynic. My reality-relativistic response: what is “real”? This may seem like some wordgame, but it’s not. What people and societies might consider real, I might consider delusional and vice versa (I’ll admit, especially vice versa). And it changes through time and space. The world is not an isolated lab-like environment (little moment of zen: the lab is in the world, but the world is not in the lab*), where you can objectively check off “realistic” or “delusional”. Eventually reality is in the eye of the beholder, who may not have full spectrum sight but can discern many shades none the less. But it doesn’t mean you don’t reach out your hand to someone in need, whether you think it’s “real” or not.
She calls “changing the world with your thoughts” delusional, with which she brushes aside a whole body of research on the subject of consciousness, no matter how small our current insights in this field may be. Besides that, being aware of your thought process and being able to shift your attitude to dodge life’s curveballs is valuable. And it doens’t mean you never take a hit. We all do. But actions are preceded by thoughts. And doesn’t it often take some “delusional” form of imagination, beyond what is deemed “realisitic” to create progress in our world? What if Martin Luther King Jr had been “realistic”, instead of a dreamer? Or Nelson Mandela? The Wright Brothers? Or Aaron?
I’m all for critical thinking, but going the cynical route is a bridge to nowhere. And isn’t cynicism only the opposite of “mandatory cheerfulness”, ironically just the other side of the same coin? It’s easy to give “positive thinking” a bad rep if you use it as a metalabel for blind group thinking, greed, fact spinning, propaganda, overextended individualism, misguided hypes and oversimplified theories. In that light even Baghdad Bob selling abdominal trainers on the home shopping network would look like the epitome of sincerity. But at least it made for a provocative book title.
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