Positivity: The Wisdom of Crazy Purple Knock-Out Gas

Pure, unadulterated joy.

Don’t you love that feeling? The freedom, the release, the positivity? That feeling of comfort and warmth and bliss that makes you smile and remember what it is to be alive?

We are so inundated with dread, with fear, with anger and hatred and division and harsh reality. We are constantly being subjected to grim news and intolerance and denial of joy. We are slaves to community, to jobs and finances and responsibilities that rob us of pure joy.

I believe that we all seek joy. We want to feel that sensation, and we want to experience the freedom and positive energy that comes with it. Almost every act we commit is in search of happiness and joy.

Because we are so surrounded by negativity we do not give enough credit to the little things that make us joyful. For example – I have now rewatched the second trailer for Star Wars – The Force Awakens more than a half dozen times. For two minutes the swell of music, the images of a long time ago in a galaxy far far away stirs that feeling of joy, of bliss within me. It is like a drug, coursing through my veins…and that is not a bad thing. Star Wars inspired five-year-old me and opened my imagination, which I do not give nearly enough credit to.

Imagination. Imagination is joy. But the real joy is sharing my imagination. Whether I am creating a work of fantasy, Steampunk or sci-fi…or an inventive conversation with an eight-year-old child.

My fiancé and I often eat at a local Chinese buffet. The family that runs it are familiar and friendly, and they have two sons, ten and eight. The younger loves to chat, and recently has become a ninja or spy or some such, and somehow we got into a conversation about knock-out gas. I informed him that the good knock-out gas is always purple.

“But what about green knock-out gas?” he asked. “Turns you inside out.” Oooooooh. “Red knock-out gas? “ “Causes farting.” He laughed. “What about yellow?” “Uncontrollable urge to pee.” “How about blue?” “Freezes you solid, but your eyes still work.” And so on and so forth through a rainbow of colors and ten minutes of joyful, unrestrained laughter.

The takeaway from this, as I analyze it a couple weeks later, is that joy is something we spend too little time on and with. We need to feel joyful because it is a freedom that is in many respects the ultimate happiness. Joy is the goal of positivity, and we need to seek out the things that make us feel joyful, big and small, for both our mental and physical health.

Finding positivity is not hard, it just requires action. Knowing that we crave the freedom of joy, we should do more things to let ourselves experience it. With joy we get an enormous sense of freedom, which in turn allows us to empower ourselves. When we feel empowered, we often spread that feeling to others around us, and as such can build more positive feelings. We can use the positive feelings this generates to dissolve negative feelings. When we take away negative feelings, we open up space to let in positive feelings, and that is something we can be grateful for. Gratitude leads to happiness. Happiness is the ultimate positive attitude. Positive attitude begets positive energy, and that is always a good thing.

This is the sixty fourth entry of my Positivity series.  It is my hope these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone.  Feel free to share, re-blog and spread the positivity.