Times, they are a‑changin’ — looking at the bright sides of life

pool
After hav­ing blogged rather less than more dur­ing the last five years — and with­out a real focus, I’ll change my writ­ing habits in two ways:
First, I will write in eng­lish, because it makes much more sense to com­mu­ni­cate in a lan­guage that all of my friends and read­ers are famil­iar with. And, writ­ing in a for­eign lan­guage, makes me writ­ing in a more con­cise way — I have to think hard­er what (not) to say and how to say it.
Sec­ond, I will exper­i­ment a bit: I’ll write about my per­son­al expe­ri­ences in my busi­ness as well as my pri­vate life — and I will always try to put empha­sis on the pos­i­tive aspects of each topic. In other words: I won’t crit­i­cize peo­ple, actions, sit­u­a­tions, etc. but stress the pos­i­tive effects, inten­tions, out­comes, etc.
Espe­cial­ly this nar­ra­tive empha­sis on the pos­i­tive aspects of every­thing might sound strange at a first glance. The rea­son for me is that I got bored by the increas­ing level of — often undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed — crit­i­cism of all kind, espe­cial­ly in social media. Now and then dur­ing 2013, my Twit­ter time­line or Face­book stream remind­ed me of a Wail­ing Wall, where hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, gath­ered and lament­ed about pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, busi­ness or other people.
“Change your friends — and your time­line gets more pos­i­tive”, you could argue . Sure, but my impres­sion is that with wors­en­ing eco­nom­i­cal cir­cum­stances, more and more peo­ple are being fooled into express­ing neg­a­tive thoughts and and focus­ing on crit­i­cism than turn­ing things upside down and being pos­i­tive, con­struc­tive and cre­ative. And every­thing has its pos­i­tive side, which often does not seem worth men­tion­ing or just stays unnoticed.
And before I start lament­ing about other peo­ple’s lament­ing, I’ll shut up, get myself a glass of Chi­anti Clas­si­co, and think about the first arti­cle in 2014. I would love to read your com­ments and to delve into a live­ly dis­cus­sion on the pos­i­tive aspects of things, sit­u­a­tions and peo­ple with you!
A Happy 2014 to you all!
Photo. Pool of Hotel Por­tixol, Palma de Mal­lor­ca (strong recommendation)

3 Replies to “Times, they are a‑changin’ — looking at the bright sides of life”

  1. T. says:

    I do agree in most aspects, but want­ed to men­tion that crit­i­ciz­ing could be a way of defin­ing the pos­i­tive sides by rec­og­niz­ing the neg­a­tive and not men­tion­ing these — while pro­mot­ing the good.

    • True. I’m not say­ing that crit­i­cism is a bad thing 😉
      Yet, stick­ing to (neg­a­tive) crit­i­cism alone is the easy part of any com­mu­ni­ca­tion. To see things form the other per­son­’s per­spec­tive and try­ing to find the con­struc­tive ele­ments is much hard­er — but makes com­mu­ni­ca­tion work, at the end.

  2. j. says:

    This is a cross­ing point. Even though it’s hard to ignore crit­i­cism, we would do well to focus on the help­ful and pos­i­tive and not to go on the fly in the ointment.
    it is exem­plary to focused on the positive.

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