Sunday, February 26, 2012

Niceties

A friend of mine said something on Facebook a week or so ago that was delightfully profound. I commented and told her so, and she said I should be on Twitter. I had a chance to talk to her about it on Wednesday and she said again that I should get on Twitter because she loves my own profound one-liners. (Her words, not mine. I may think I'm profound but would never say so out loud. That would take all the humility out of it!)

She said that her own goal on Twitter was to just find one positive thing each day and tweet that. I thought that was a fantastic idea.

I started thinking about what I could tweet. I have a lot of thoughts in a day -- it was just a matter of weeding through them to choose the most worthy ones.

And I realized that not only do I not have a lot of thoughts I need to share with the interwebs, I really don't have a lot of positive thoughts. But I don't think anyone else does either. Or maybe that's just my Facebook friends. There are plenty of status updates, but not really a lot of positive things. Kind of like the evening news. I wonder if it's a societal thing to think that it doesn't matter or it's not news-worthy unless it's negative. Well, maybe not negative, but not positive.

That's what I've been thinking about this week. Every time something happened this week I'd think, "Oh, I'll tweet that!" (knowing full well that people don't really care about my every thought. Or maybe that's because I don't care about other peoples' every thoughts so I think the same thing applies in reverse). But when I held that thought up to the "keep it positive" criteria, I realized that very little that happened, or more specifically -- very little of the commentary that I thought about what happened was positive.

So that's my goal -- to be more positive. It's not easy, at least for me. And I don't really think of myself as a negative person. Realistic, yes. Cynical, no. Sarcastic, definitely. Room for improvement? Absolutely.

I believe that as continue to (internally, at least) narrate the events of my life and strive to become more positive in that commentary, it will influence the rest of my life as well.

2 comments:

  1. What a wonderful goal. Thanks for sharing. We are truly bombarded with negativity all around us, and it's a real struggle for me, sometimes, to keep a positive outlook. I think you're right-on with your other comments in this post, too. Reminds me of that scripture, something about letting virtue garnish our thoughts continually. It takes real time and effort to do that!!

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  2. Yep. Experimented around with Twitter but came to the question: what possible useful thing could I ever say in 140 characters? Having not found an answer, I hardly ever open it anymore. I tried "following" some people (Queen Rania of Jordan, etc.) but all I ever saw could be described as "Twibble."
    ~~~~~

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