The Importance of Optimism

"We Need Optimists." That's the title of a front page Sunday Review essay in the New York Times this week by Arthur  C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new book, The Conservative Heart. He starts off with a quick story. His son had made a really bad grade on a test. After a parent-teacher conference about it, Arthur's wife broke the silence in the car by saying, "At lease we know he didn't cheat." That glass is always half full for the optimist, and ready to be topped off.

Brooks reports recent psychological studies that indicate optimists are generally healthier than pessimists, and more resilient in the face of setbacks. Optimists also self-report greatest levels of perceived happiness. In my own analyses of human performance, I've learned that optimists tend to have a more complete form of access to all their resources, inner and outer, than pessimists.

If optimists are, generally, healthier, happier, more resilient, and more resourceful, then why wouldn't everyone seek to be one?

Well, first, there's The Cautionary Tale of the Irrational Optimist - the many examples that almost any of us can produce of people whose enthusiasm for life and their own ideas makes them oblivious to problems, obstacles, and the real probabilities of a situation. This is the mindset so thoroughly critiqued by Barbara Ehrenreich in her scathing book, Bright-Sided. But to be an optimist, you don't have to be a simpleminded idiot or a stubborn fool. In fact, it helps greatly not to be either. You can be a realistic optimist - and that turns out to be, not surprisingly, the best kind there is.

A realistic optimist moves forward with eyes wide open, seeing obstacles, understanding challenges, and yet maintaining a determination to be creative in solving all problems. The realistic optimist never just hopes for the best, or blithely assumes the best, but works hard to make the best happen, in full realization that it may take longer than it should, and be harder to accomplish than anyone could have imagined. But it's precisely the element of optimism that fuels a hopeful and persistent struggle forward. Optimists don't prematurely give up, or surrender, in their efforts to create good things. And optimists like me promote the optimistic mindset, just like I'm doing now. Why? We really believe it works and that it can work for you.

Of course, pessimists want to convert us all to their alternative way of thinking. And I've always wondered why they even try. Don't they have to believe they're unlikely to succeed? They are pessimists, after all.

Martin Seligman, in his classic study, Learned Optimism, argues that you don't have to be born sunny side up. You can become an optimist. And you can benefit greatly from adopting this pervasive attitude.  Plus, if you're already moderately optimistic, you can enhance that proclivity.

I just know you can.

I really do.

Embracing Change

The entire universe is engaged in a wild dance of change. In 500 BC, Heraclitus wrote, "Things are always changing." He was just echoing the Chinese I Ching, or Book of Changes, from much earlier in history. What would Heraclitus say now? Probably: "I told you so."

For so long, the nature of human life and civilization was mostly out of synch with the roiling reality of change below it, in the atomic and subatomic substructure of the cosmos. People lived much the same, day to day. There was an illusion of stability and solidity. Generations came and went in basically the same conditions. Even wars were all pretty much the same. But at some time toward the end of the last century, the mask of predictability slipped off, and we began to see the true face of change. And now, it just continually speeds up.

So, how do we embrace chance, rather than resisting it, resenting it, and then regretting it? We have to embrace a worldview that values growth and learning, second only to love. But of course, in order to live and convey love in the best ways, we need to learn and grow and ... change. Love isn't static. It's dynamic. Love is always changing. It either grows and flourishes in ever new ways, or it decays and diminishes. We know that, but we forget it. If you believe that nothing is more important than love, then you hold a worldview that requires you, for consistency, to embrace change.

"But not all changes are good." The voice in our heads will inevitably object.

A worldview that embraces change doesn't deny this at all. It just affirms that we can deal with any detrimental change by making our own healthy changes, in attitudes, actions, feelings, and thoughts. As long as we live, we can embrace change, either in a hug of affirmation, or as committed wrestlers twisting and turning it into something better than it at first presented itself to be. Embracing is engaging. It's sometimes about joy, sometimes about judo. But love can't just flee in the face of change. It always seeks to encounter the reality of what is and make the best of it. That requires always using what we have, being at peace within, and moving forward with courage and hope.

Things are not often what they seem. Neither are changes. Love will always caress or correct. It will embrace the realities of this dynamic world order and dance with the flux as it finds its way to the greatness that is its due.

How about you?

Note: This the first of a series of blogs by request. You guys have written me and suggested things to ponder. This is where it starts.

The Adventurous Mind

Where is your next adventure? What will it be? When will it happen? And, how?

In her book, Deep Play, the modern poetic explorer of all things, Diane Ackerman, writes: "People often ask me where they might go to find adventure. Adventure is not something you must travel to find, I tell them, it's something you take with you."

The adventurous mind is always on the lookout for the new and challenging and wild - something to be explored, tackled, or tamed. Adventure is an attitude, a dynamic inclination, a way of living and working. It's best found where you are. And then it takes you to where you need to be. It's always about what's next. It's the way curiosity moves through uncertainty with danger or delight.

Where do new things come from? The adventurous mind finds them, or makes them. It's the mindset of discovery and creation. It's also the soul of intentional becoming and growth. It's a spirit and a cousin of courage. Its enemy is inertia, armed with fear. It's up to us to cultivate it and free this wellspring of the new from whatever would chain it down and hold it back.

So: Where's your next adventure?

You carry it inside you.

Bring it to the world.