When we were little, every one of us was afraid of the dark. And that's because in the dark, nothing can be seen clearly. A hat rack looks just like a monster in the corner. A pile of clothes looks like a creature crouched in waiting. Even the noise of the heater turning on sounds to our minds as a stranger roaming the hallway. When I was little, I remember seeing the shadow of my own hand in front of my face and I could swear it was a giant spider. Needless to say, I didn't sleep well that night.

Now some of us were scared to death of the dark and needed a night light for years, while some of us can't recall any fear of the darkness at all. Psycological studies have shown this being attributed in part to some learned behavior and experiences. But most interestingly, a key factor to a child's penchance to anxiety is heretical behavior. Some children actually inherit tendencies to higher levels of anxiety, while others are born less likely to react to these stressors. But no matter where we fell in this spectrum when we were little, the darkness had a tendancy to psych us out.

Believe it or not, that doesn't change much as we grow older. Where it's true that many of us grow out of our fear of the dark, our anxiety concerning the unknown is as strong as it ever was. The hardships in our lives always seem to fly out of the darkness that frightened us in our youth and blind us to the road ahead. And then all we can see are those monsters and creatures as large as life, or larger, as our imagination can congure, leaving us as overwrought as those childhood versions of ourselves once were in our bedrooms late at night.

That is the power of our perceptions.

Our reality is formed by the way we think. And the way we think is formed by the way we teach ourselves to think. "Thought" itself is a discipline; a learned behavior. If we have innocent minds, it is because we never learned to foster darkness in our minds. If we are negative and sarcastic people, it is because we favored the negative and sarcastic lines of thought to up-beat and optimistic attitudes. Dirty and perverse-minded people endulged those types of thoughts, whether they can accept that or not. Angry and bitter people have nurtured their vengence. These patterns of behavior, and their predictablity, go on and on.

As the question goes: is the glass half full or half empty? It sounds elementery to us now, but rarely do we engage it. Nowadays, we are prone to accept life as it comes to us, and that includes our mental and emotional lives. But just like our bodies, our emotional and mental health and development are the results of what we have put into it. Just like our bodies, good disciplines and attention to habits yield a healthy body. But poor disciplines and innatention to habits yeild bodies that range from "could be much better" to "how are you still alive?!" Ultimately, the way we think about life requires attention in order to arrive at good mental and emotional health; a "half full" state of being, if you will.

We all tend to naturally react to hardships in our lives with fear and anxiety. And we don't know what will happen to us next, because we can't seem to see past the veil of darkness draped over our senses. But when we can remember the analogy of the half full or half empty glass, we are met with this question: will we get up and turn on the lights?

It can be a daunting task. On the one hand, we are afraid to look our hat rack demons in the eye. And the prospect of seeing our monsters in the full detail of the light can be fully terrifying. But on the other hand, in view of the light, we can see that it is just a pile of dirty laundry at worst and easily dealt with at the mercy of a little water and detergent.

As I had written in "The Forge" (november 5, 2008), the hardships in our lives are meant as hammer strokes in on an anvil. They can hurt like crazy, even to our breaking point. In view of the darkness, all there is during this process of forging is stress and pain, crushing our smiles more and more with each passing blow. And in view of this, how could there possibly be any good to come from hardships? But in view of the light, we can see the process of our hardships for the trials, even blessings that they are. When we are stretched in life, we often feel we are being slowly destroyed. But in reality, we are being formed and strengthened.

And so, I put it to you this way:
Does your reality reside in the darkness...or in the light?