Tell me lies
 Tell me sweet little lies

So goes the Fleetwood Mac song from the big-hair, big-shoulder-pads days of the 1980s.

But what if there’s some wisdom to those words? What if telling yourself a tall tale can be a good thing?

Let me tell you a story to illustrate what I mean.

In the winter here in Toronto, the sun sets earlier and earlier in the afternoon until the 4:43 pm winter solstice sunset in late December, after which it starts, slowly, to lighten up. Consequently, I have to face a 33 km drive home from work in the dark. This involves negotiating my way through thick traffic on three different highways (motorways if you’re a Brit) one of which – the infamous 401 – is the busiest highway in the whole of North America. And I hate it.

So I kept tensely telling myself, my hands clenched tightly on the wheel and my eyes clamped fearfully on the road.

Luckily for me, Buddhist practice makes you more aware. And so, one evening in the midst of my private hell, it dawned on me that my constant repetition of, “I hate driving in the dark. It’s so dangerous,” was stoking the fires of fear and trepidation in me to a high blaze.

A Wayne Dyer audiobook I’d been listening to on repeat during my morning commutes pointed out that since we have the freedom to tell ourselves any story we choose, why not choose a positive one instead of the more usual negative one. So that’s what I did.

I started repeating to myself, “I love driving in the dark. I’ve got this.” My anxiety decreased, and as my mind let go of doom-filled expectations, so did my body. I was fully alert, but out of the adrenalin-draining danger zone.

Now calmed down, I subsequently made two additional changes to make my drive home less harrowing. A slight change to the angle of the driver’s-side wing mirror has stopped the blinding glare of reflected headlights from vehicles behind me . And I no longer slavishly follow the instructions of my GPS when it tells me to leave the highway and take a “shortcut” on streets, where oncoming headlights used to dazzle and flummox me.

And here’s the thing. I continue to experience real benefit from my new story, even though, in the beginning, I regarded it as a Big. Fat. Lie.

[T]he last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Victor Frankl, psychiatrist and Nazi holocaust survivor