As we were sitting down to dinner a few evenings ago, I was getting myself a glass of water and my 2 and a 1/2 year old said to me, You’re so pretty, mom.
I was surprised, since he’s never said anything like this to me before, so I said back to him, I’m so pretty? Oh wow, thanks bud.
I enjoyed this compliment for maybe a second or two before he said it again, at which point it became clear he was actually saying “Your soup’s ready, mom.”
I laughed a little and then I thought, well, good for me.
Scientific and psychological study shows that we are prone to something called a “negativity bias.” That is, as infants and children—and consequently, as adults—we absorb information from our environments in an asymmetrical manner. Our social-emotional development is informed much more deeply by anything negative we pick up than any positive.
This is not something we choose to do. It is not something unique to me, or you. This is how we have evolutionarily evolved as a species as a matter of safety. And even though in most cases we no longer require this neural conditioning for physical survival, the bias persists.
This doesn’t mean that the negative we experience is not real. It’s not imagined, or made up. It also doesn’t necessarily mean that no positive reinforcement is present. But there’s a logical reason certain things stick in our brains, and others don’t. The fear response stays with us as a matter of keeping ourselves out of danger. It makes sense that an overwhelming wellspring of positives must be poured into a person to even remotely make up for the negatives.
Without getting too scientific here, the point is that we are conditioned to be much more influenced by negative feedback than positive or neutral feedback. We are attuned to threat. My brain is braced to hear and retain either something negative or innocuous like “your soup’s ready,” far more readily than “you’re so pretty.”
And yet—in this moment I flipped the switch. My brain analyzed the information in the affirmative. I took a neutral comment and created something lovely out of it.
My other son, who’s six, was looking for something in our bedroom the other day and was struggling to find it. All of a sudden he found the thing he wanted and said, “I looked a different way and I saw it.”
I looked a different way and I saw it.
It is literally a part of our human conditioning to have eyes prepared for the wrong in the world. To feel the hurt. To see the wounding more than the healing. It is part of our make-up to operate out of the negative void. The subtraction in our lives adds up to a whole lot more than the addition.
We do not naturally have the tools as children—or adults, for that matter—to analyze certain information coming into our brains in a neutral, let alone positive, way, unless we are given those tools. We must be modeled how to find emotional equilibrium. We must be modeled how to dig down into a deeper well to receive and believe our own self-worth.
A surplus of positive regard for ourselves only comes about from serious intentionality on the part of our teachers—or we must come to an age when we choose to seek out how to reach this equilibrium on our own. Maintaining a surplus for ourselves requires the daily tapping-in to a Source that is higher, wider, deeper, gentler, more expansive than any human negativity can touch.
I have to believe this is why we seem to have an epidemic of people (primarily men) who are operating their entire lives based on a fear-based deficit. They have ingested so much negative messaging—without enough positive influx—that the only way they know how to exist is to see the worst in everything, and everyone. They live out of the belly of the worst in themselves.
If all you ever hear about—and feed yourself—is fear, threat, not-enough-ness, danger, othering, a protect-myself-and-my-privilege-mentality, and so on, that’s the world you’re going to exist in. It’s the world you’re going to keep creating for yourself and others. You make a fear-mongering hellscape of scarcity where the privileged few become more protected and privileged—at the expense of safety and thriving for everyone else.
To look a different way does not mean—I wear rose-colored glasses and everything in the world is rosy. No. That’s just willful ignorance and apathy. Toxic positivity.
To look a different way does not mean that the negative is not there, or never was there. To look a different way does not mean that the wounding, and the hurt, and the pain, and the wrong does not exist. It does not let off the hook those who are causing or have caused the wounding and the hurt and the pain and the wrong.
We can look a different way (by which I mean, not turning away, but looking with fresh eyes; a new perspective affixed on the good) and still acknowledge there is bad in the world. That suffering is real. That things are very, very messed up.
We all have the keys to look a different way, but we have to choose it. We have to will that way of looking into existence. We have to be taught, or teach ourselves, how to do it.
When we learn to look a different way, life unfolds. We see things that weren’t there before. Your soup’s ready becomes you’re so pretty.
This isn’t about living in delusion but rather, knowing that the sun still comes up and shines on everyone. It’s trusting that the world is full of mystery, and magic, and wonder, and love, and watching it pulse through the pain.
I’d like to look a different way and believe—I’d like to see—that what appears to be a nation held hostage by tyranny, run by a few bad players, is drawing out from the woodwork the goodwill and grace actually felt by the many.
I’d like to look a different way and know that when things look bleak, there is so much possibility waiting in the wings.
I am looking a different way and experiencing the kindness and generosity of my neighbors and strangers who stopped by the side of the road to support my son’s recent 5-cent-origami-jumping-frog enterprise.
I am looking a different way and feeling Spring spring up around me—even if winter returns for a few unexpected reprisals.
I am looking a different way and knowing that this moment is ripe for the good to rise up and seep through the muck.
I am looking at myself a different way and seeing you’re so pretty, child even when—yes, even when—the world is laughing, saying, no, your soup’s ready, silly mama.
You have shed a thousand skins
to become the woman you are today.
And if you ever feel overwhelmed
by the many women you once were,
remember your bones have grown
but what makes them has never changed.
The ghosts of the women you used to be
are so proud of who you have become,
storm child made of wild and flame.
— Nikita Gill, 2015
A few other things:
Learn about and/or sign up for my upcoming remote, self-paced, six-week workshop, Facing the Sun, HERE. There are two starting dates to choose from: March 20th, 2025 and April 20th, 2025.
View and shop my new print series, Summer Blues, HERE. For a more affordable series of images, visit my prints offered by Artfully Walls. There are a few new ones coming soon.
If you or a friend need help thinking about how to make your home space better suited to the way you want to live, I’d love to be of service. Learn more about my environmental therapy offering HERE.
Buy my books here: Wabi-Sabi Welcome and Al Fresco.
“I looked a different way and I saw it.” That’s a new life motto, right there. 💛