Recognizing and Acknowledging The Good
Most days when I drive into work the on-ramp to the freeway is metered. I have a second or two to decide which of the two lanes to wait in for my turn to enter the freeway, and although I do my best during that small window to pick the lane with the shortest line, I don’t always pick right. I used to get the sense that I always would pick wrong and it seemed like every single day I’d still be stuck waiting while a car who entered the ramp behind me gets to take off ahead of me. To be clear, this is an incredibly low stakes decision and the consequence of me choosing wrong adds at most an extra twenty to thirty seconds to my commute. But it would still bug me. How could I be so bad at picking the right lane? Why did the universe hate me? It might be a little easier to swallow if not for the fact that I would often be confident I had picked the right course, but just because of the way that the cars were either spread out or bunched up together in either lane, even when I would pick what seemed to be the shorter wait time I would still choose wrong. What changed for me was making a conscious decision to recognize and acknowledge the times that I did in fact choose the right lane. I think what was happening is that every time I did pick the faster lane, I would discount it as a lucky fluke and not average it into my seemingly poor track record, but then every time I picked wrong, I would use this as further confirmation of my own poor judgment and the overall cruelty of the world around me. But once I started recognizing and acknowledging the times that I did in fact choose the right lane, I seemed to notice that I picked the right lane a lot more often than I gave myself credit for. It’s not necessarily that I became a lot better at anticipating the flow of traffic, but that I got better at acknowledging my own success when I did choose the right, even if I still often chose the wrong lane. I think that we are often a lot harder on ourselves than we need to be and it warps our perspective of our own power and agency to effect change within our lives, and also our worldview of how often things tend to work in our favor. If we are struggling with an addiction, or getting rid of a bad habit, or struggling to ingrain a good habit, or fighting against a sin or a temptation that easily besets us, it is easy to fixate on all of the times that we have failed and use this as evidence of our own worthlessness and the hopelessness of our cause. But if we can take the time to recognize and acknowledge all of the small and minor victories, even if such victories don’t automatically solve all of our problems or irrevocably forestall all future failures, then we can begin to form a clearer picture of our own abilities and the possibilities that life has in store for us. This new outlook hasn’t stopped me from sometimes picking the slower lane on the on-ramp, and it doesn’t stop me from getting frustrated when I make such a choice, but it does help me take some small measure of joy and comfort in the times that I do make the right choice, and I have tried to carry this outlook into other areas of my life that have a little more lasting impact. I know that the more often we look for the good, the more often we will find it, whether in the world outside or within ourselves.
