For the next several Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

What is pronoia? Well, obviously it’s the opposite of paranoia—instead of thinking everyone’s out to get you, you think that the world is conspiring on your behalf. And, the funny thing is that it’s true!

“Glory in the Highest” (page 4) starts with the sentence “Thousands of things go right of you every day, beginning the moment you wake up.” Brezsny then goes through dozens of examples of things that go right before you even leave for work in the morning—you wake up still alive! the sun is shining! the toilet works!—and asks of each wonder, how does that happen? How does your body know to keep breathing and pumping blood even as you sleep? How did your hands come to be such “astounding creations that allow you to carry out hundreds of tasks with great force and intricate grace”? Who sewed the clothes in your closet, baked the bread in your cupboard, and engineered the miraculous feat of hot and cold water flowing at your command?

I like to think of myself as a pretty positive person—I tend to show lots of gratitude in easy times and look for gifts and lessons in hard ones. But the appreciation and wonder Brezsny points to in this article is a new level of seeing bounty and good grace, even for me. As I read this passage, I found myself in silent thanks for the soft bed I lay on, the sunlight streaming through the window, and the heat blowing up through the vent in the floor. I began to connect with my surroundings in a new, awestruck way. Every thing, every breath, every thought seemed a great gift—especially the capacity to see these things, feel these breaths, and notice these thoughts.

“Let’s say it’s 9:30 a.m.,” Brezsny writes. “You’ve been awake for two hours and a hundred things have already gone right for you. If three of those hundred things had not gone right—your toaster was broken, the hot water wasn’t hot enough, there was a stain on the pants you wanted to wear—you might feel that today the universe is against you, that your luck is bad, that nothing’s going right. And yet the fact is that the vast majority of everything is working with breathtaking efficiency and consistency. You would clearly be deluded to imaine that life is primarily an ordeal.”

Of course, Brezsny is speaking primarily to those of us who are comparatively wealthy—Westerners and the privileged all over the world. We might not have everything we want, but we have warm homes, running water, plenty of clothes, and the ability to buy ourselves most of what we need when we need it. Why, then, do we also seem to have the tendency to get bent out of shape about the tiniest problems and focus so much on the things in the world that make us unhappy?

I certainly don’t exclude myself from this category. I know I can be a whiny little brat sometimes, like when I think someone driving in front of me should have taken an opening to merge, or when I get frustrated with my grandma when she doesn’t answer my questions as directly as I wish she would (heaven forgive me!). I know I’m incredibly lucky, and yet I get annoyed with strangers and loved ones more than I would like to admit. Sometimes the ups and downs of my days originate in events so mundane that it makes me laugh. With all the good fortune and love in my life, why do I get so bent out of shape?

I suppose it’s mostly habit and laziness. I don’t want to be pulled out of my own little world to slow down and let others take the time they need to do what they need to do. In protecting my right to go as fast as I want, I end up being as thoughtless and reckless as the other people I bitch about. Ain’t that a kick in the head.

Looking at this pronoiacally, though, I guess getting upset with myself when I do this doesn’t help much. What seems to work better is to snap on a new lens, the one that looks for and invariably finds beauty in the present moment. When I am able to do this, everything shifts, and the large perspective, the one that sees terrible problems as mere setbacks, emerges.

From this perspective, “Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed schtick. Wallowing in despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.” (page 28) It’s true that our stories—news, books, movies, TV shows, everything—are full of conflict, violence, and despair. Where are the stories that originate from that beauty-seeking lens? Where creation and freedom hold more fascination than strife?

Brezsny exhorts us to write those tales, to seek them out and share them, even though our conditioning makes this difficult, almost impossible. We must retrain ourselves to “gather the secret stories of the human race’s glories and successes.” We must “fight tenderly for beauty and truth and love without despising those who spread ugliness and lies and division.” Pronoia aims to teach us to do just that by intermingling the silly and the sacred and the sideways.

What are your thoughts on Pronoia so far? Do you connect with the deep celebration of the everyday Brezsny calls for in “Glory in the Highest”? Are you bored with evil? What did you think of his experience with the neverending givingness of the sun? Or with the reckless blonde in the Jaguar? Share your thoughts in the comments.