Bryan’s Ramblings

In general, I think most people would consider me a fairly cynical person. I don’t think I’d necessarily disagree with this assessment, but it does affect me, and I am actually often offended by it. I don’t strive to be cynical; cynicism just finds me. Even so, every time it is pointed out to me, I think, “I need to be a more positive person.” For the most part, I surround myself with positive people, and most of the time I am about has happy-go-lucky as they come. Unfortunately “easy-going” does not equal “positive”. In fact, I’ve found that being care-free is often what leads to this jaded negativity that I must exude. When you don’t really mind things very much, you tend to let bad things happen without really noticing them. When these things build up over time, they eventually result in some sort of minor explosion that tends to look something like pessimism. Invariably, for me anyway, it isn’t really anything negative as much as it is a form of venting designed to help calm down a series of strong emotions. Still, I’m such a stubborn soul that I’ll take my own ranting to heart and go on believing whatever brash opinions I’ve formed in my state of conjecture. Then they stick around for as long as possible until someone pokes holes in their thin existence and I start questioning myself (after first nobly defending my original position of course).

The flip side of this, however, is the potential of being so overly positive about everything that you end up seeing everything through rose-colored glasses. This is not a place I want to be. I’ve known a lot of people who have lived like this and it never turns out well. This sense of bliss is usually just ignorance in disguise. So I guess the trick is finding the balance between positive and negative attitudes such that the combination equals happiness. I always talk about balance and how it’s what I strive to achieve in all aspects of my life. It’s easily the hardest thing to solve, though, because there are so many variables in the equation that it becomes almost impossible to balance both sides.

Since this positive-negative balance is nearly impossible to achieve, I often end up using compensation as the answer. By this I mean that when things are negative, I try to shove a lot of positive stuff on top of it to compensate. (Rarely do I throw negative stuff on positive things though…what’s the point of that?) The major problem with this method is that the negative aspects do not go away, they just get temporarily hidden, only to be exposed later when the fabricated positive items expire and disappear. I need to start trying to take care of those negatives to balance that side of the equation instead. To keep with the math analogy, I need to work on simplifying.