Do you ever have trouble staying positive? This can be a tough mindset to maintain, as maybe your parents are constantly on your back or you can’t get a break from school, which leads to a flow of negative and angry thoughts. I want to inform you, though, on why staying positive matters and how to maintain a positive attitude toward everything, if not most things in life, as I firmly believe it’s always important to maintain positivity in your life. Without positivity in your life, everything could very well just turn “gray” with no sunshine and rainbows.

Positivity matters. You may be thinking, Why should I always maintain a positive attitude? What good will it do to always stay positive? I’m sad to say I used to think this way and become negative disturbingly easily, especially when things did not go my way. But with every bad, there’s a good, and that mindset can help you get through negative situations already.

Things happen. Not everything in life goes your way, and sometimes you just have to accept that and look on the bright side. If everything went your way, then it’d be a perfect world, but unfortunately, this world is far from perfect. That doesn’t mean you can’t tell the good from the bad, though. A story I once heard from a pastor was that his father had been diagnosed with ALS. He and his family were devastated, and he then began to ask, Why him and why his family? Why did they deserve this? ALS is a very rare condition. But this brought out moments with his dad that he realized most likely never would’ve happened if his father didn’t get ALS. He then realized that he should cherish those moments and accept that everything happens for a reason, even if it seems unfair or wrong.

What’s to say: Being positive won’t help others? Anne Frank once said, “Whoever is happy will make others happy too,” and to this day, I still stand by that quote. Think about her situation, where she was locked up in a bunker all day for two years, yet she still stayed happy, which helped her family and fellow comrades in hiding maintain a more positive attitude even though they were angry people. Now I aspire to make others positive even in dire situations to benefit others and myself because, as Albert Einstein once said, “Life is like a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep moving.”

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