Air Conditioners

The Law of Attraction states that positive thoughts and words bring about positive results, and negative thoughts and words bring about negative results. I am not entirely convinced of this Law, in that I don’t believe that I can cause a plane to crash by imagining it in a fiery ball falling out of the sky. Still, I have noticed that when I focus my own attitude on positive outcomes and what I want to achieve instead of negative outcomes and what I fear might happen, I have better results.  

Case in point… My air conditioner was not keeping up last week. In the 100 degree Tennessee heat, my apartment would not cool below 80, and the air conditioner was running 24/7. Unaware that it is, apparently, unreasonable to expect an AC unit to cool inside air more than 20 degrees below outside temperature, I was convinced my AC was broken. My maintenance man assured me the unit was fine, which only served to frustrate me.

“I might as well go home and roast,” I would say. “My air conditioner is broken.” Sure enough, I was too hot, and my air conditioner seemed to not work. Even in the early morning hours, when the outside temperature was cooler, I would get up and look at my thermostat thinking, “I don’t care what my maintenance man says. This thing is broken.” And my thermostat would say the house was 78, instead of the 74 I was trying to achieve. I was so negative, and irritated, and frustrated, that I couldn’t even be nice to my maintenance man, though he had been quick to check my AC for anything he could fix.

Want to know what happened, next? My water heater broke.  

It made me laugh. “Of course my water heater broke,” I thought. “I’ve been doing nothing but complaining about how things around here don’t work. My focus on the negative couldn’t help but bring more negativity.”

I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t found my sense of humor. Maybe they wouldn’t have been able to fix the water heater the very next day, or maybe the temperature outside wouldn’t have cooled enough to allow my AC to work, again, or maybe I would have gone out to find that my car wouldn’t start, because “when it rains, it pours.” Or, maybe everything would have been fixed the next day, just like it was. What I do know is that finding my sense of humor allowed me to sleep more peacefully than when I was aggravated, and that I felt better the next day chuckling at the irony of a hot house and a cold shower than I had felt the day before, grumbling at the ineptitude of my AC condenser.

Whether thinking positively actually has an effect on the world around me, or just on my own perspective, I can definitely say that thinking positively brings about more positive results for me than being negative. If that’s the essence of the Law of Attraction at work, then I believe it. And just in case it also works to “bring about what we talk about,” the way the metaphysicists say it does, I’m going to quit complaining about looking old and getting fat.