The Flip Side

The world is filled with infinite possibilities, but do we actually know that? So let’s delve into this one today, shall we?

My job is to awaken possibility in other people.

– Benjamin Zander

This is another one of the many recent epiphanies I’ve had, and even I did not know that this belief was present in my mind. I was talking to a friend I met after an interval, and after the meeting, we were talking about not having a picture together. To that I replied, “We’ll get it the next time we meet”. Let’s just say that my friend has plans for the future, so she replied “We don’t know if we’ll meet again”. But my response blew my own mind, “If we don’t know what’ll happen, how are we sure we won’t meet?”. Wow, I mean at times I am so mature, that even I can’t believe it. I digress, but what hit me about this statement was how often do we choose to believe what we want to believe.

In a wide range of circumstances, we only tend to believe whatever we want to believe. Let me demonstrate this with an example. There is an actor whom we dislike. We believe that he is not a nice person, that he is arrogant and doesn’t treat people with respect. In case a person comes and tells us about a news article of the said actor treating media officials disrespectfully, there’s a good amount of chance we’d believe them, without even going and checking out the integrity of the news article ourselves. Why? Because it’s already true in our minds, we already believe that the actor is capable of doing such a thing. This is such a huge advantage that we have as human beings, the ability to control our own thought patterns and beliefs.

Having this great ability gifted to us, it’s quite funny that we tend to forget about the existence of the flip side of almost every single situation, thought, occurrence and belief. Let’s talk about the above example. Unless we don’t know the actor personally or without enough information, we’ve no basis to classify him as a rude or arrogant person. We can find many examples in our daily lives which we can relate with this ideology. Heck, we can even relate it to our own ambitions. Let’s talk about that for a second.

It’s been said with emphasis in the past that a person is his own worst critic. There are things we want to have, be or do, but rarely think of implementing just because we don’t believe we can accomplish it, the odds don’t appear to be in our favor and most of the time, without even considering the actual credibility of our ideas, we stop even wanting to do that. But let’s just think about for like 10 seconds. What if it actually came true? What if we actually can accomplish that goal, the thing we want to have, be or do? I’m not asking you to actually do it right now, but just think about it. Feels good, doesn’t it? Again, think about it, if it feels this good just to accomplish it in our thinking, how good would it feel when it’s real, in front of us?

In the end, every thing we do in life is to make ourselves and the people we care about feel good, don’t we? And if contemplating a situation till the point we can see a flip side that actually makes us feel better about it does that, why shouldn’t we do it? I mean, I’m not asking you to find meaning in the scolding your boss gave you 2 minutes ago, or in your broken leg. But if just finding a possibility in a situation makes us happy in the moment, I think it’s completely worth it to spend those 10 seconds every now and then when we’re feeling something that’s contrary to happiness. We’ve not seen our entire lives, and that’s the beauty of it. Since we’ve not seen it, just like we can’t be sure of the success of an aspiration, we can’t be sure of its failure either.

So, let’s make a little effort together to make this brave little change in our lives, and see both sides of a situation before being so sure of something not working out.

Thanks a lot for your time and effort to read the whole thing. If you like it, please share it with someone who you think might benefit from reading this. Until next time, stay awesome and stay happy. 🙂