The Awful Secret About Life’s Bad Stuff

Everything that comes into our lives, we’ve attracted magnetically…. You have to avoid giving your attention to bad stuff … because you’re just attracting more of that stuff.  Seriously.  Think about it.

                                                                        -- Paul Harrington, The Secret to Teen Power

OK, I’ve thought about it.  Seriously.   Here’s what I think: The Secret to Teen Power – now available in Botswana’s leading bookstores – may just be the least sensible book I’ve ever come across.  Let me tell you why.

Teens, like the rest of us, are forced to confront all manner of difficulties -- defeat, disease, death -- and they often ask why this must be.  Apparently, these concerns are misplaced.  In fact, there’s no need to ponder.  The Secret to Teen Power has a straightforward answer to life’s most profound questions. Author Paul Harrington tells us that it all boils down to The Law of Attraction, which, in a nutshell, says that negative thoughts attract "bad stuff" into your life, while positive thoughts attract good things.

If we take Harrington seriously, we should stop wondering, for instance, why Togo’s national football team suffered a fatal rebel ambush in Angola.  It appears that those bullets must have been attracted, like lethal homing pigeons, to the negative thoughts in the minds of the bus driver and the two Togolese officials who were killed.   As Harrington confidently asserts, there’s “no flaw in the law”.

Armed with these insights, we can begin to comprehend why Togo, having withdrawn its team in response, is now barred from the next two Africa Cup of Nations competitions.  Is Togo’s fine of $50,000, applied by the Confederation of African Football, really enough?

And it’s not just bullets that whizz toward beckoning targets.   The smallest affliction, even “a pimple when you’re due to meet your crush – YOU attracted that too,” Harrington warns.   But wait, there’s hope: “If you can attract a major zit using THE  SECRET  - then you can also clear your skin using the same power of your mind.”  Gee kids, let’s just think those blemishes away!

This Law of Attraction strikes me as grossly simplistic, if not daft.  Many of us, let alone teens, would love to believe that if we wish for something hard enough, it will happen.   The more difficult truth is that, if you work for some goal hard enough, it could happen.   Sadly, there’s no easy equivalence between effort and results.  But it is true to say that, without considerable effort, life’s most fulfilling achievements are unlikely.

Can a school prepare students fully for life’s seesaw between unexpected blessings, momentary calm and awful tragedies?  Probably not.   But schools -- and parents – can and must cultivate life’s one essential quality: grit.  This goes well beyond The Secret to Teen Power’s gibberish about the power of positive thinking.  Grit is gumption; it’s sticking with serious difficulty when the going gets tough.   If you have grit, you don’t banish negative thoughts, you bear them, until healing or time allow for their passing. 

An influential mentor of mine, Susan Herman, a wonderfully tenacious woman who died last year of pancreatic cancer, showed how to cultivate grit in kids.  Once, while at university, her daughter Melissa called home in tears to say that she hated her Adolescent Development professor and could she please drop the miserable course altogether.   Susan’s reply was simple: “We’re not quitters. Just sit down and do the work. You’ll be glad you did. She’s not the last difficult person you’ll have to deal with in your life.  And besides, adolescent development is interesting.”  I wish all parents were so wise, both about adolescent development, and allowing the hard knocks of life to proceed un-buffered.

It is infinitely harder to explain to a teenager how to endure loss, how to bear the sadness of death.

The Law of Attraction obviously cannot do this.  We must acknowledge, to ourselves and to teens, that the negative thoughts associated with loss and grief demand moments of unflinching attention.  Not to dwell on it for every waking moment in some crazed, stoic pain cave, but to allow suffering to work through until we have accepted that what has happened cannot be undone, and, what will be, cannot be known.

The awful secret about life’s bad stuff is that pain cannot be deflected by a forced march of happy thoughts.

Teenagers must learn what many adults still struggle to absorb: wisdom is acquired in small, difficult doses.   In the words of the famous prayer: “Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Andrew Taylor is the Principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana.  His email address is: principal.map@gmail.com.  Maru-a-Pula’s website is: www.maruapula.org