Half-Complete Positivity
I had the chance to spend time with someone who is extremely positive and cheerful.
I am the kind of person who lies in dark rooms thinking about the meaning of life and repeatedly dwelling on what is missing. So I found that person’s simplicity strangely uncomfortable.
They saw an uneventful life as the highest good and believed that having the same kind of day over and over again was the best way to live. Harmony and unity mattered most, and behavior that went against them was sometimes treated as selfish.
It made me think that even positivity, something that seems unquestionably good, can become a kind of prison if one has too little experience of its opposite.
If we automatically condemn complexity, jealousy, anger, danger, conflict, and uncertainty, then perhaps we are only allowing ourselves to recognize half of life.
Neither families nor organizations can ever be entirely good, peaceful, or bright. If I am able to remain the cheerful one, it may be because the people around me are carrying the shadows I refuse to see, unconsciously balancing the whole on my behalf.
That person reminded me of the bright, safe, harmonious world Sinclair grows up in at the beginning of Hermann Hesse’s Demian, as if that entire world had somehow taken human form.
In many ways, I was the opposite.
I am individualistic. I enjoy experiences that involve risk and challenge, and I have always found it difficult to endure a life without change. Around that person, I gradually stopped revealing myself. I could only offer small, passive responses.
But in a way, I was doing the same thing.
Perhaps the reason I could not relate to those ideas, and found them so intensely uncomfortable, was that I had spent much of my own life leaning too far toward the opposite extreme.
I had almost treated stability, boredom, conventionality, and simplicity as sins of their own.
So there we were: two very different worlds, unable to understand each other’s language or way of thinking, unable to fully mix, feeling a certain strangeness toward the other person’s way of life, and awkwardly coexisting.
For me, being able to genuinely acknowledge what that person says may actually be a sign of growth.
Looking at the direction my life has taken lately, I seem to be surrounded by people who keep introducing me to values I once dismissed or even treated as taboo.
At first, being in a place where my usual way of thinking did not seem to work at all felt suffocating. I kept thinking that I did not belong there. It felt like wearing clothes that did not fit.
But over time, I began to experience some of the things those people value.
And to my surprise, I realized that I actually liked quite a few of them.
Through that, I have started to understand that life contains far more possible ways of living than I once imagined.
Ten years from now, I might be married to someone I never expected and living as the mother of a child. I might even be someone who has worked at the same company for ten or twenty years.
Those are not lives I have spent much time imagining for myself.
Of course, this does not mean denying or abandoning my natural disposition.
What I am learning is that I do not have to trap myself inside it either.
These days, I keep trying to force unfamiliar ways of living into my life just to see what happens, and sometimes I want to throw everything away and quit.
Maybe that is why a little angel of positivity has appeared in my life.
Maybe that is why they keep smiling at me while preaching their half-complete gospel of positivity.
If we can learn how to communicate well, perhaps we could teach each other something the other person does not have.
I do not know whether that person sees it the same way.
So for now, I suppose I should start by learning a little of their language.