Sunshine in times of darkness

When life brings forth pleasant things we call it luck. When things go awry, we attribute it to destiny. In good times we advocate the benefits of being positive and in bad times we find comfort in blaming it all on destiny. All the time we are secretly hoping that someone or something comes along and changes everything for the better. We trudge along our lives with this hope firmly in place and the eternal wait continues, till the day we realize that we alone are responsible for our happiness. No pill or potion can give us that. One life changing thought is all that it takes.

It's said that the optimist views the glass as half full, while the pessimist views it as half empty. The optimist sees the doughnut while the pessimist sees the hole. Today the inclination is towards the positive thinkers. The grouches have lost. Perhaps, more people are enjoying the doughnut.

Not that there aren’t enough reasons to be pessimistic – terrorism, recession, climate change, corporate fraud etc. It’s also much easier to be pessimistic because if events do turn out badly, there is at least the morbid satisfaction of having been proved right. In the unlikely circumstances that things end well, it can be a pleasant surprise.

Pessimism — or what some call realism molded from bitter experience — is like a virus, which is why most of us like the sunny dispositions of our friends, spouses, bosses and leaders.

Negative thinking never actually did anyone any good. It's a well established fact that negative thinking is behind a "host of maladies" that have gripped the world's population today. All that it does is pull you back from trying new and better things, because one begins to find happiness in misery making it difficult to leave the comfort zone.

In contrast, optimism can be revolutionary, points out writer and environmentalist Alex Steffen. “Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act...Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is.”

Despite some of the obvious positives of positive thinking, most of us revel in the gloom.
Not only do we like to believe that tomorrow will be worse than today but that nothing can be done about it.

We all want the world to be a better place but we belie the hope if we refuse to acknowledge the progress that has been made. If the world’s problems look intractable, it is because we have given up thinking of solutions and have little faith in the people who are trying to put them into practice. As Leonard Cohen put it: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in.” So where are the chinks of light? Or can we not see them because of the shadows we are accustomed to?

Almost no one likes to confess to optimism, which is usually dismissed as the refuge of unrealistic fools. There is always a sense that things are going downhill. The golden age always lies in the past, never in the future. It is this deficit in social optimism that has to be addressed.

In the epic Mahabharata, King Yaksha asks Yudhishthir what he thinks is the most curious aspect of life. Yudhishthir replies, “Mortality is a fact of life. Every person sees someone dying, yet people live as if they are immortal.” Isn’t that optimism?

(With excerpts from Mind over Matter by Neelam Raj)