As the Twig Is Bent

I pay attention to words, and I’m especially sensitive to the subtleties of the positive and negative.

For example, the other day, I caught myself writing to a friend, “I can’t have lunch with you until I finish my next children’s book.”

I imagine that most of us would read that sentence without a second thought, but I revised it because I’d rather express myself in a positive way. I changed the sentence to:

“I look forward to having lunch with you as soon as I finish my next children’s book.”

Same message, but with a vastly different tone. Words such as “I can’t” or “I won’t” hit me in the face like a damp dishtowel. Words such as “I look forward to” and “I will” brighten both my outlook and my day.

When my children were young I taught myself to say, “I’d be happy to take you to the store as soon as you put the finishing touches on cleaning your room.” This is a “yes,” and my young children knew they were doing fine and had only a little bit of work to complete.

I could have said, “I’ve already told you twice that I won’t take you shopping if your room isn’t clean. Don’t ask me again until your room is clean. Totally clean.” If I said that I might have felt better for a moment about all of the other frustrations in my life, but to my children it would have sounded like a criticism, and that probably would not have gotten them to clean their room. Nor would I have gotten a warm and fuzzy response from a child I love.

There is a saying, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” To prove this point you need look no further than the Monterey peninsula where the cypress trees, blown by strong onshore breezes, point away from the sea. Just like those trees, when you talk in positive terms you also think in positive terms, and you point both yourself and others toward happiness and success.

In writing my blog for the past five years I occasionally get stuck, and catch myself thinking, “I’m going to run out of time. This is hopeless.” But then I remember an old cartoon from the New Yorker. Two men are shackled hand and foot, facing each other, halfway up the very tall walls of a prison cell. The single window has bars, and is too small for either of them to squeeze through. Nevertheless, one prisoner is saying to the other, “I have a plan.”

He has plan, when most of us would have given up.

Each of us, every single day, is that onshore breeze bending twigs – the thoughts and attitudes of ourselves and others.

I’m going to have a very good day. And so are you.

Alan