The Power of Negative Thinking
Martha Q’s piece in the last issue, in which she touched on the negative consequences of too much positive thinking, reminded me of a few things. Her writing often has this effect on me.
The approach of a new year has brought a lot of curious optimism into our circles, as friends and family are making resolutions and offering theories for future success. Some of these include: positive visualization, putting out what you want back (a variation on “what goes around, comes around”), The Secret (aka: the power of abnormal obsession with focusing on your goals), reach for the sky, climb every mountain, be all you can be. In addition to these are a whole tribe of relentlessly cheery notions.
As a farmer of 42 years, I never ran with any of these. I always expected the worst, and usually got it. Farming is good that way; there’s always something to complain about simply because nature is never ideal. Nature always makes mistakes and has to blame someone. Because farmers are usually out standing in their fields, they get it, and have to take it.
I can say without a reasonable doubt that no matter how much positive energy I put out, it always came back negative. When I first started farming north of Fort Collins in the 1960s, I noticed that my neighbors threw tantrums whenever nature went against them, which was more often than you might think. I recall one of my neighbors, Jake, throwing his hat to the ground and stomping on it like a mass of cockroaches, just because the dew hadn’t fallen for three consecutive nights, keeping him from baling his alfalfa properly, so it was slowly turning into heaps of dry stems.
Fred, a top beet grower, actually fell upon the earth and pounded it with his fists, cussing bloody murder if it rained at the wrong time, which it did almost every time it rained.
Our best barley grower, Dennis, was known to kick buckets around the yard whenever the wind blew hard enough to lodge his crop (wind after a rain or irrigation causing the crop to fall over and become difficult, or even impossible, to harvest properly) or when the wind shriveled the barley heads to some extent, reducing its bushel weight. Even after Dennis accidentally kicked a bucket full of bent nails and broke four toes, he still kicked buckets every time the wind blew from the north.
Then there was Ralph, who grew the most enviable fields of pinto beans for miles around. Every stage of a bean’s development is delicate, critical, and so close to the edge of disaster that I saw Ralph out in his fields at night with aimed headlights or even a flashlight, checking things, though I never knew what. If anything happened in the life cycle of his beans that was less than ideal, Ralph beat his fence posts with a shovel until either the post or the shovel relented.
Ben, whose corn always outgrew and out-yielded every neighbor for miles around, boasted he would eat all the weeds that came up in his fields. Several of us snuck in one night and carefully transplanted about a dozen Canada thistles in the hedgerows of his best corn field. We then moseyed around to Ben’s shop for coffee the next morning, and mentioned the sight of thistles. Ben dashed out and we all stood there, waiting for him to chow down. Instead, he lit into those thistles bare handed, rolled them into a ball, and took them back to the shop for incineration, never letting up on the cuss words.
I sometimes tossed the hog with a stockman named Richard, who owned an extensive and valuable junkyard. One day I came over to his place on a treasure hunt for a machine part and caught him in the process of destroying a junk truck with big dirt chisel. When I asked if he was OK, he said, “Now I am.” He later explained that his milk cow just died.
Observing this behavior in my formative years as a young farmer, and noting that this behavior was exhibited by some of the best farmers in the community, it’s easy to understand how I became disoriented at the mere prospect of positive thinking. I woke up in the morning, thrust on my Big Bens and headed out the door expecting to go to war, not work. I looked at the sky and asked it to go ahead and hit with its best shot, because I was ready at all times to detonate a grenade of cuss words at the heavens every time something didn’t go right, which, as I’ve said, and as you can easily guess, was a daily occurrence.
I stopped inflicting harm on inanimate objects after a few years, more out of fear of injury than conviction, but I never let up on maintaining a constant, low-level negativity in my attitude and I never stopped cussing at the heavens. As the years rose on, I noticed that it really paid off. My crops were usually better than expected, and in spite of everything clearly stacked against me, I made it through to harvest and, with a dash of survivor’s conceit, fueled up and did it again the next year.
But make no mistake about it; not a single day went by in 42 years on the farm when something wasn’t running afoul with the weather, a machine, a person, an act of government, or the progress of a crop.
Well, OK, maybe there were one or two days of peace and perfection, but don’t push it.
John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Creede.
