Being cheerful in difficult times

While smiling and being cheerful doesn’t always come easy, it would appear we can train ourselves to feel more positive emotions. It all depends on what we choose to focus on in any development, event and situation. We can focus on tragedies and nothing more, fixate on a single negative aspect of an unfolding event, or find the aspect in that event or tragedy that will ‘burn out’ the pain, so to speak, and either make us smile or just shrug off whatever is happening, thus making us much calmer.

What can be that aspect? Anything, really. It depends on an individual in question and the situation in question. Having a hobby certainly helps. Our minds need stimulation and when we are distraught, we need to find something else to focus on or, paradoxically, focus on nothing. Just silence. When images of terror and evil are around us, we can find even a minute aspect, a glimmer of hope, to focus our minds on instead.

Cheerfulness can come at unexpected moments, even though there doesn’t seem to be anything comical going on, yet we smile or burst out laughing. You can see it sometimes when people who are angry laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation they are in. It’s a defense mechanism, in part, which causes the anger to diminish, disappear or turn into merriment. It’s as if our own mind is telling us to chill out.

Being always positive doesn’t work, because we feel it’s a lie, and embracing one’s sadness and anger is vital, but these emotions can’t devour us. Rather, by embracing sadness and anger, it’s like a cleansing which can give way to unexpected bouts of cheerfulness. Again, having a hobby, such as writing, helps. Energy flows where attention goes, as they say.

Schadenfreude helps sometimes, too. There are probably those who are forced to be cheerful and smile as they dance in hell. Or former and particularly insidious enemies of Israel, whoever they were and wherever they were from, cursed and forced to parade as female IDF soldiers. That vivid vision, so Kafkaesque, of someone stuck in a hellish and absurd scenario, is comical and uplifting in itself.