I think the key to what's bothering me is here:
There are some pretty subtle distinctions that I'm going to draw, I think they're important. Our brains are organs that take in an unimaginable amount of information and assemble all of that information into a sensible story. Not necessarily a true story, but one that makes sense to the brain.Over my nine and a half decades of life, I have concluded that counting our blessings is far better than recounting our problems. No matter our situation, showing gratitude for our privileges is a fast-acting and long- lasting spiritual prescription.
As information is received and assembled, there's a function in the brain that responds through something like free association: thoughts and feelings about the information are constantly generated. The generation process is something that what we perceive as our conscious selves have no control over. But some part of our brain latches onto these thoughts and feelings as our reaction to the story.
I'm going to steal another of Andy's visualizations. Imagine you're sitting at the top of a hill overlooking a freeway, watching the cars go by. You see a big oversized SUV sporting half a dozen Trump flags and honking its horn. The free association part of your brain throws out all kinds of thoughts, but as you have a negative view of Trump supporters, your concentration fixes on that car and follows it. Your brain responds by telling a story about what the people in the car must be like, how smart or dumb they are, whether they wear masks, etc. You grab onto both thoughts and feelings about the people in the truck. And you stop seeing all the other cars on the freeway.
But you can choose not to focus on the SUV. You can acknowledge "Oh, there's some Trump supporters." "You can be curious about them in a non-judgmental way." And you can let go of the thoughts and feelings generated about the truck and return to watching the cars on the freeway drive by.
The SUV is still there. You aren't ignoring it by being grateful for the Prius with the Biden bumper sticker that you just spotted. In stead, you change your relationship between you and the SUV and choose not to grab onto the negative thoughts and feelings. You don't focus on the SUV and create a story,
Going back to the blue sky metaphor, I fear that what Nelson is encouraging is not thinking about the clouds obscuring the blue sky and just pretend like we can see the blue sky. We can't change our relationship to our problems if we don't recount them, approach them with curiosity in the place of judgment, and then choose to let go of the thoughts and feeling that obscure the blue sky.
The whole process involves feedback. Certain media pushes us to latch onto thoughts of feelings of fear, anger, and resentment. If we choose to cling to these thoughts and feelings, we can't see the blue sky. And we train the brain to think that feeling anger, fear, and resentment are important, so it will reflexively grab onto those feelings as the brain randomly pumps out thoughts and feelings. It's self reinforcing, and leads to folks I think we can all recognize in our lives as outrage junkies.
We can't bury or avoid our problems. But, if we want to see the blue sky, we have to develop a relationship with them that doesn't involve clinging to clouds of negative thoughts and emotions. And that's the piece I fear that Nelson has left out. Distraction can work to a degree, but the mind will eventually return to the problems without any change to the way we think about them.
There is also a fine line involved here. I can use this technique to help me experience joy. I can talk to others about how I do that. But I cannot judge others for their choices. Telling someone, you shouldn't be miserable because you wife died because look at all your other blessings. And that's a very fine line to walk. A person's relationship with their thoughts is a deeply personal matter -- and telling a person how they should think is not the same as teaching them how they can think.