My husband and I just returned from a trip to Tahiti, an island about halfway between Australia and South America. It was a fundraising trip for Southern Virginia University, where my husband is a professor. We’re all in on supporting SVU – so we sailed out on a marvelous eight-day cruise, joined by the amazing President Bonnie Cordon and a truly splendid group of people.
Out on the water, I made a conscious choice to record all the good things about this trip. I wrote them down. It’s something I do now on all my vacations, or really just any time I’m having fun. Why? Because my brain has something called negativity bias. We all have it, but mine seems to be more pronounced than some. When something goes wrong, it can become the focus of my entire day, and I am unable to move on.
To give myself some credit, I am actually pretty good at finding positive meaning in the “bad” things that happen. On our S Curve Insight Tool that we administer, my score on that section is typically pretty high. And that’s a good thing. I’m glad I’ve honed my instinct to look for the silver lining when things go amiss.
But what about when you experience something truly positive, like eight days in Tahiti – really anything that makes us stop and smile, really smile – when that happens, do you, do I, have the ability to lock in the positive? To pluck it from the air and take the time to appreciate it?
The answer is, yes, we all have that ability. And because of a phenomenon in our brains called neural plasticity, where our neurons can rewire themselves – we can be even better at locking in the positive.
So: I am doubling down on my journal-keeping. Which, by the way, I think is increasingly important as we further accept AI into our daily lives, so we stay in touch with who we are, how we feel. Gerrit Gong, formerly with the U.S. Department of State, and now a leader in a worldwide Christian faith, had this to say about preserving that human spirit:
“Our most human and humane purposes and values will need what the poet calls our ‘deep heart’s core.’”
Stopping to appreciate a flowerbed, to mark in your memory its colors, smells – it strengthens our ability to stay in communication with that ‘deep heart’s core.’ And the practice becomes crucial when it feels like everything else is crashing down around you.
When we only remember the past through a negative lens, and when we notice the pattern but chalk it up to how we’re wired, we are abdicating responsibility for our lives. Other dissonant cases hold true – if we see the past through thick rose-tinted glasses, and the present looks like the apocalypse, we have also revoked our responsibility to seek that core.
The same goes for my own pattern, trying to balance the present weight of woe-is-me with the search for a silver lining, days, months, years from now.
But we do have to search out those moments, like an archaeologist, uncovering and cataloguing and appreciating what lies just beneath the surface – before it’s lost to time.
When we search out what makes our past, present, and future beautiful, we are taking responsibility for being ourselves.
We are choosing to exist fully within our own lives.
All best,
Whitney
P.S. I’m doing an experiment this week with my daughter. We’re recording our own Beautiful Moments, inspired by a project hosted by Jennifer Aaker and Jenna Abdou. All you have to do is record something beautiful that happened – an image, a snatch of a conversation, a memory, an accomplishment.