Now I’m a positive person. I couldn’t have had a childhood more helpful to hopefulness, so I grew up in a point to see in every dark cloud and the bright side to every uninteresting situation.
But as we get older, the dark clouds grow and the light that lines them gets slimmer. Life’s disappointments, big and small, tend to do that.
As I approached what the scientific world calls adulthood, I had to adjust my angle to accommodate certain truths about the world—for example, that things don’t always work out (as I’ve said) and that bad things happen to good people.
That fear sometimes gets the best of us and that we are not protected to failure.
And that we cannot always be sure.
And that we aren’t Superman and therefore we can only achieve within the limits of our humanity.
But I’ve also learned something else in my brief and rather uneventful (in terms of suffering, at least) time on this planet: that limitations can be overcome. That despite the disappointments we face every day, despite the mistakes we make and the people we hurt and who hurt us, we can find greatness and success and comfort… as long as we keep going.
We need to learn to forgive ourselves for our failings and be able to move on in order to succeed.
That, says my new adult mind, is what optimism is: being able to say “so what?” to our imperfections and mistakes and pushing forward.
It’s seeing the good and accepting the bad (because that will always be there), and not giving in to the comfort of self-pity. In my case for today, it’s forgiving me for not being able to do two things at the same time, no matter how much I want to give my 100% effort to both.
Those who fail are those who give up because they let their guilt at being damaged drag them down. What a pointless trouble! We’re all damaged. And things won’t always work out.
But so what? Imperfect creatures of what we are, as long as we’re alive there’s hope for success. To stop is to fail. So we’ve got to keep moving.
No comments:
Post a Comment