Henry Van Dyke, an author and statesman of the 19th and 20th centuries, wrote a poem about this, on which I often reflect. It’s called “Thoughts Are Things,” and it goes like this:
I hold it true that thoughts are things;
They're endowed with bodies and breath and wings;
And that we send them forth to fill
The world with good results, or ill.
That which we call our secret thought
Speeds forth to earth's remotest spot,
Leaving its blessings or its woes
Like tracks behind it as it goes.
We build our future thought by thought,
For good or ill yet know it not.
Yet so the universe was wrought.
Thought is another name for fate.
Choose, then, thy destiny and wait,
For love brings love and hate brings hate.
The one amazing thing about thought is you cannot have a positive thought and a negative thought occupy the same space at the same time. Opposing elements do not co-exist. Happy and sad, pleasure and pain, light and darkness, fear and courage are all examples of opposing emotions. Las Vegas is built on winning more than 50 percent of the time and people losing more than 50 percent of the time. So is your life.
The more you think about how you can enhance another person’s life, the more your life will be enhanced. With this action you can see the development and growth in the individual. You can feel the fulfillment of your actions. Your positive actions towards the individual will release the ego, fear and anxiety in your life and allow for the feeling of contentment, accomplishment, happiness, freedom and energy to enter your system.
The more you enhance a situation or an individual, the more you enhance yourself. You release “spiritual endorphins” into your system, you experience a euphoric feeling, a “runner’s high,” but it’s a spiritual high. The thoughts you have are now elevated to a level where there is no room for negativity. Even when you are attacked by chaos, and evil-thinking people, your first thought is how to learn from this experience and not react negatively to the experience.
The opposite works in the same way. The more you think on how to hurt someone and create gain for yourself, the more you only create hurt for yourself. While you see the individual lose because of your actions, you too, will feel a loss. Your negativity towards others will create insecurity, low self-esteem, anxiety, fear, jealousy, reactiveness and more debilitating emotions causing you to be held captive to a negative way of life. You become a back-stabber, telling stories of others just to make yourself look good. However, you are discovered by the multitudes, and your circle of friends diminishes and the buzz of booze or the delight of drugs is what you use to enhance your spirit. You have lost control.
How do you get back on track? How can you get back to good and blessings and love? You need to look inwardly a find the reason for your negativity and resist the urge to react to all things that bother you. This maybe electrifying to you, but a light bulb has a positive pole and a negative pole attached by a wire filament that create resistance. The greater the resistance, the brighter the light. The more you resist the urge to negatively react to a circumstance, the more light you will generate inside you. The more positive your thoughts become, the more influential you become, the more control you will have.
Peter Remington is an executive at Houston CityBook and also a business consultant and life coach. For more information on him and his Prepare 4 More, visit here.
Jeff Gremillion
Robin Barr Sussman