Positive

I feel as though the times in my life when I am most wanting to be positive are the times when I didn't feel I had much choice but to do so. I think this is the true positivity, which is knowing very clearly what you have to offer and what limitations you have to work with. It's not something that is just contrived or based on any number of possibilities, but it's something that is close to the ground.
   I have recently felt a pain in my foot, for which I have sought a lot of treatment, even though I don't know the source of it. It's taken a while for me to get used to how to move in it, and to let go of my worries about what the pain could be. One of the things it's forced me to do is to question whether my beliefs are really productive ones, or whether they might just be going against my interests. If I think of the worst case scenario, I start to imagine all sorts of possibilities that aren't necessarily real at all, and I am not even prepared to entertain such possibilities. Instead of thinking how this change is a disadvantage compared to in the past, I can start to ask myself: how can I work with this now, and who will help me through it? In fact, these are the things that are precisely being taught in the proseminar course at OISE, which is how to survive a PhD. Could the same principles of surviving the PhD also apply to life in general?
   There are parallels between PhD and "life in general", in the sense that they are both mysterious projects which at times have no foreseeable outcome or end. The despair one feels at the beginning of that project is the task of defining one's purpose and commitments, particularly around the things that are of most interest and to which one can contribute some meaningful information to the community.  But there will also be setbacks along the way that are just plain unforeseeable, because you are working in the middle of creation, which always entails risks and uncertainty. In that sense, the PhD might be a kind of condensed version of the kinds of uncertainties and 'forks in the road' that can play out in the stretch of a lifetime, unbeknownst to us.
   To go back to my original point, it seems that positivity is always a response to challenge. To simply be positive without a challenging limitation or obstacle may be a bit redundant, because the positive heart and attitude probably needs to speak to something that is not necessarily positive. I remember someone joking about this, when he said that if he lost his job, he wouldn't feel that positive about the watch he is wearing on his wrist. Why not? Because the positive attitude can't just sideskirt the challenging situation. It needs to connect with the challenge in a way that it sees it in a completely new light that is refreshing and workable. If I lose something that is dear to me, an attitude of ignoring that loss would not be a genuine positive experience: it would be a kind of blunting of the senses and mind through denial.. So the positive always needs to ground itself in something that feels a bit challenging.