I’ve sometimes been told – and thought – that my positive ideas and enduring hope make me unrealistic. I don’t know a lot of optimistic people, and I tend to avoid the pessimistic ones.
My friend Ron Dotso is positive and optimistic in part because he trusts in God.
I am optimistic because I believe in myself; I don’t expect a deity to rescue me.
When I feel fear and uncertainty, I look down, not up, inside, not outside. It’s my job to be hopeful and trust each day as I live it.
I don’t jump to conclusions, make predictions, or look years ahead. I don’t tell other people what to do. I can control none of that. I am in complete control of today.
One message I got a few weeks ago said I was naive. “Your flowers are not going to save you,” he said, “things look bleak.”
It”s true; my flowers will not save me. But they make today quite bright.
If you look at the news for even a few minutes, he said, there is very little to be optimistic about, especially the future.
I don’t know that to be true.
My faith is acceptance. I accept the past, the present, and the future, whatever it brings me. If there is a God running things, great.
If not, I will take responsibility for my own life. I have no idea what the future will bring.
I don’t believe that people who think positively – including me – are unrealistic. Like most of us, I have little control over my life and the planet’s future.
I can’t stop the cruel politicians, the greedy and powerful ones, and their followers. I can’t change people’s minds and halt hatred.
I don’t try.
I can’t wave a magic wand and get Mother Earth to stop going to pieces. She seems desperate to reach us.
I choose to be optimistic rather than pessimistic, hopeful rather than gloomy and frightened.
I was a reporter for some years and a police reporter for some of those. I understand that bad things happen in the world.
Like everyone else, negative people, ideas, and events all slip into my consciousness.
They are all around, like mosquitoes after a summer rain. Their buzz is always in our ears.
I stop and ask myself this:
What about today? What is happening today? Can I do good things today? Photograph a beautiful flower? Help a refugee child? Visit Memory Care with Zinnia? Go for a walk with my wonderful wife? Rescue a flower? Read the new Colson Whitehead book rather than a doomsday book about how the heat will kill me first.
I’m not blind. I see and hear everything everyone else sees and hears. But when I find myself drifting towards the negative, I violently slap my head (internally). I remember that it’s never what I see that’s important.
It’s what I miss when I give in to fear and doom.
I’m missing the absolute truth.
When you look for beauty, you find it. When you look for ugliness and despair, you find it. We choose what we seek. We know the rest is out there, but what we seek is the biggest part of who we are and how we see life. We also choose what we share, if we share, and that can make a difference in the world.
Thank You for sharing beauty.
>[flowers]
Beauty evokes energy. Healthy creative energy. Need energy, Anybody?
> about today?
Yeah, for sure. “Next good thing…” as that Disney song said. Pretty good movie, that. There’s actually some good stuff out there for our children.
I try to remember to keep my mouth shut about bad stuff, even when it’s really gross and upsetting. Dwelling and bothering about that gets in the way of good stuff. Children _need_ light and hope and excitement and OKness. We all do to do our best.
Like this post.
Cheers,
Rufus
Yes, to everything you say.
One of our politicians, Jack Layton, wrote a letter to Canadians shortly before he died from cancer at the age of 61. This was the last paragraph. I think you might like his words, as I do:
“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”
This past weekend, I saw a terrific production of Candide at The Glimmerglass Opera. Candide, by Voltaire, is a satire about the philosophy of positivism espoused by Leibnitz. Candide begins the opera as the poster guy for “cockeyed optimism.” He believes in the notion that this is the best of all possible worlds. Throughout the opera, Candide is continually disabused of his unquestioning belief that “everything’s great – couldn’t be better” (to paraphrase the Broadway musical Golden Boy and totally mix all my showbiz metaphors). Ultimately, Candide comes to understand that life is neither good nor bad. It’s what we all make of it. And, it’s important to “tend our own garden” (the final lesson of Candide) and to cultivate the life we each want the best way that we can. Seems to me that is exactly what you are doing both literally and figuratively with your life and your garden.
Thanks Susan, that is spot on…
“I am the grass. Let me work.” — Carl Sandburg
That’s truly being present. Then whatever beauty is shining around us gets seen, even if other things are falling apart.
This book is a hopeful look at the reality of doomsayers over time and, hopefully, what we might find in the future. The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey.
I’m with you. Reach for the joy. Flowers are a beautiful bonus.
Wow! When I first saw this photo, I thought it was in 3D. No matter how many times I look at it, it still appears that the flower is in 3D.
Just stunning!