Disengaging from the negative past

Disengaging from the negative past

VITHAL C NADKARNI


FOR all the allure of bestsellers like Power of Now, much of what we do focuses away from the present moment . Here you are huffing and puffing away on the treadmill sweating like a slave. Your goal is to savour a slimmer shape for tomorrows party. Here you are steeped in caffeine, battling sleep to overachieve, to get a crack at next years ESOPs. Whether its saying no to sweets at lunch to save your appetite for dinner or scraping and saving here and now in order to send the kids to college in the distant future, most of us spend our lives pursuing our own visions of the future.
You will be surprised by how much of our cognitive energy is invested in as-yet unrealised goals, writes the late Kansas University psychologist Rick Snyder in Hope over Time. As far as we can tell, this future orientation distinguishes humans from other animals. In fact, the majority of the animal kingdom appears to operate in a Zen-like state of ever-present focus.
Snyders contribution to positive psychology included a theory that demystified hope for researchers , clinicians and laypersons (along with a now-classic experiment on Good Morning America). He analysed motivational forces that enable us to disengage ourselves from the negatives of our past by making excuses and granting forgiveness, for instance to connect to more positive or more hopeful possibilities of the future.
The research also uncovered paradoxical nature of hopeful thought, what Sanskrit poets call the shackle that enables the convict to run: Although hopeful thought is primarily a future-oriented behaviour, the events of the past are paramount to its development and maintenance, Snyder said. ( Yet) hope does not develop best in people whose lives were idyllic. Instead hopeful thought is optimised when children are allowed to encounter and overcome obstacles to their goals. Learning to navigate the roadblocks that life throws at us, along with the negative emotions that arise out of these roadblocks , are fundamental to the development of hopeful thinking in adult life.
But when negativity triumphs over hopefulness beware of cognitive error: people frequently attribute the origin of their blockages to their worthlessness as humans , believing that they are stupid or pathetic instead of redefining the goal more objectively . Whatever may happen let it, remember You are That .