I get many of my ideas for posts here on RJsCorner and RedLetterLiving from my friends at ProgressiveChristianity.org This is one of those posts. I don’t know if the book The Power Of Positive Thinking is still popular, I kinda doubt it be I am certain that other authors have jumped into the venue of Positive Thinking.

Like everything else in life, thinking positively can make things more tolerable by putting our problems in perspective. But, it can have a detrimental effect when it is used improperly.

I am afraid that many people who claim to always see things positively are actually just glossing over problems and thereby refusing to even admit that the problem exists. This kind of positive thinking can result in tragedy. We need to learn that ignoring problems just causes them to magnify and for even more problems to occur. Unless we face our inadequacies we have no hope in improving our life.

I can admit that living in my dream world is often more pleasant than facing the one around me every day. Part of my daily routine is to spend the first hour in the morning browsing all my news sources for what is happening in the world. That gives me fodder for my daily posts here, but it can sometimes be hard to do. My dream world which I try to get into at least a couple of times a day seldom has problems, everything is what I want it to be.

If we never admit that we have problems they will just fester until they are almost intolerable. There are many areas in life where it is very unhealthy to deny our problems. We, at least for us white folks, are sometimes racist. If we don’t admit that and try to eliminate it we will never conquer it. We need to recognize our shortcoming and accept that they are negative things in our lives.

Yes, positive thinking definitely has a place in our lives. Without it we would likely live in a Mad Max world of gloom and doom. But, like everything else in life we need to balance it out with accepting the less positive things. That is the yin/yang of life’s balance.

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Writing this article got me to thinking about the 1952 book written by Norman Vincent Peale entitled The Power Of Positive Thinking. I decided to do a quick Kindle re-read of the book and found I don’t see it the same way as when I originally read it in the 1970. No surprise I guess 🤪 but I think it is worth a post here in the near future.