HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY?
I’m a glass half empty sort
of person. Always have been. Not depressingly pessimistic, or necessarily a
doom or gloom merchant, but someone who has tended to see more dark than light
in situations more often than not. I always rationalised my attitude by saying
I was neither pessimistic nor optimistic but would declare self-righteously
that I was being realistic.
Whenever, on the odd occasion, I was accused
of being a pessimist, invariably I would limply defend myself by saying, “Anyway,
a pessimist is an optimist who has all the facts!” Not sure, but I think this
is an old Russian saying.
Unlike me, my wife, Brenda, is the eternal
optimist; although when I lost my job about six weeks ago, the uncertainty and
insecurity of our immediate future hit her hard and her cheerful optimism
deserted her for a few days. Strangely enough, during this time I held her up
with a genuine positiveness that I didn’t know I possessed. Strange things our
minds and our capricious prevailing attitudes!
“The
mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and
defeatism.” – Pat Conroy, The Lords
of Discipline.
Brenda soon bounced back to
her usual positive self and since then we’ve both seesawed between positiveness
and negativity, usually with the positive one supporting the negative other
through his/her dark times.
Occasionally our dark times match and this
generally leads to conflict as we try to project our fears onto each other.
Thankfully, we both quickly recognise when this happens and soon after any
eruption, peace is quickly restored.
Fortunately Brenda’s innate optimism and
faith that “everything happens for the best” - and we’re given opportunities to
find hidden strengths within us and to learn more about ourselves - are far
more resilient traits than my pathetic attraction to defeatism and self-pity
when I allow my fears to get the better of me. As Winston Churchill said, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every
opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” That
pretty much sums up her attitude most of the time.
So, despite the challenges we’re currently
facing, we are upbeat about overcoming them and moving forward together into
the next phase of our lives.
Joey Comeau, A Softer World: Truth and Beauty Bombs, sums
up our attitude: “It doesn’t matter if
the glass is half full or half empty. I am gonna drink it through this crazy
straw.”
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