Back story: Last week, I took a wild spill from a moving vehicle during a work-related event, which I'm happy to report I survived. The next day, in relating the story of my fall to someone, I mentioned that as I was plummeting toward earth, I was hoping I wouldn't pull a Christopher Reeve on impact and end up a quadriplegic. The person's reaction: An admonition not to let such thoughts enter my head, because thinking them would ensure that they would be made manifest.

That triggered an equal and opposite reaction from me that's become a mini-obsession for me over the past few days.

OK, folks, word of warning: Do NOT even start with me on that crap, which I blame on Oprah and that insipid book, "The Secret." Unwanted things happen whether you envision them or not. For that matter, so do good things, although I have less experience with that end of the spectrum. As I said to this person: Did my mother die when I was 11 because I envisioned it? No. (And do not try to talk me out of this. Yes, the cancer happened to my mother, not to me directly, but when you're an 11-year-old girl, your mother's death is also something that happens to *you*. Profoundly.)

To broaden it beyond my own life: Was the Holocaust just the collective failure of six million Jews to want badly enough for it to stop? And to ludicrously extend the example to a recent pop-culture reference, Amy Poehler as an exasperated Hillary Clinton perfectly captured it in that "Saturday Night Live" sketch when Tina Fey's Sarah Palin suggested that her own elevation to vice presidential nominee was a result of "wanting it." Poehler/Clinton (the real-life Clinton having clawed and scraped during the Democratic primary for every vote she got, even after it was clear to everyone else that she had lost) noted sardonically that, yes, perhaps not wanting it badly enough was what cost her the party's nomination.

I agree that there is value in maintaining a positive attitude, if only because people like you better when you're not exuding negativity and that in itself can initiate a chain reaction in a positive-ward direction, but that is a function of human nature, not of what pictures appear in my, or your, head. Do NOT expect me to believe this tripe that something good or bad happened just because I visualized it. Believe me, I have visualized plenty of good things that have NOT happened (or else I would have won the lottery years ago, become a famous humor writer, and married George Clooney), and have not visualized plenty of bad things that HAVE happened.

And I will go so far as to suggest that the attitude espoused by the person I was talking is an unintentionally cruel blame-the-victim approach that is not helpful when one is in pain, whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual.

Further, I will posit that unpleasantness is a necessary aspect of life. There's a quote I remember latching onto when I was younger, and I apologize that I can't remember the source: "No one ever had the rainbow till he had the rain." (As I reread this, I suspect it comes from one of those sappy Top 40 songs that populated the soundtrack of my youth.) I've come to believe that one can't know soaring joy without also knowing deep sadness, or appreciate beauty without also recognizing ugliness. If I remember my high school science correctly, and it's quite likely that I don't, even an atom needs both positively and negatively charged particles to hold together.

And with that, you may commence gagging. But keep thinking good thoughts.