When I was a college music major, our choir was scheduled to go on a European tour. Each one of us had to pay $1,300 toward the cost. At the time, this seemed like an enormous sum of money (actually, I guess it still does). On the day that our first two-hundred-dollar-deposit was due, I found myself reluctant to part with the money that I had earned the previous summer working at a playground by day and McDonald's at night. I had the $200. But I didn't think I could come up with the other $1,100. The deposit was non-refundable, and I didn't want to lay it out and lose it if I couldn't come up with the rest. I decided to talk with our choir director, Dr. Harriet Simons. I told her of my fears. At first, what she said to me seemed useless and unbelievably naive coming from an adult. "It all boils down to whether or not you are an optimist or a pessimist," she said simply. "If you are an optimist, you'll find the rest of that money and go to Europe. If you are a pessimist, you'll wave goodbye to us at the airport."
"It can't be that simple, Dr. Simons," I said. I explained to her that my widowed mother was not wealthy and I was trying to put myself through school. She smiled and shared with me that she too had come from a poor family and had put herself through school. "As you get older, you'll see that I'm right," she said in her typical no-nonsense manner. "Now are you in or out?" I didn't want her to think I was a pessimist, so I gave her my $200 sure that I had just wasted a month's rent. "Good, I thought you were an optimist," she said. Her approval felt good, but I had serious doubts. I had never heard such silly advice in my life.
As the year went on, true to my fears, I had a very hard time making the regular deposits. On the day the last deposit was due, I was still $700 short. "I need that money," Dr. Simons pressured. But I still couldn't bear to part with any more money because I was sure that I couldn't come up with all I needed. At this point, I understood what Dr. Simons had tried to tell me that first day. If I were an optimist, I was almost half way there. If I were a pessimist, I had dumped $500 in a black hole. I decided I could not let that money go to waste. I gook an advance on my credit card and I'd figure out how to pay it off later. When the plane took off for Europe, I was on it. I was an optimist!
I'm tempted to say that I hadn't known I was an optimist until this event, but I think it's more accurate to say that I became an optimist as a result of this experience. And I know that it might sound corny to say this, but my life truly began to change at this point.
When Dr. Simons first gave me her optimist/pessimist advice, I thought she was suggesting that I could sail through life on a magic carpet of hope. Yes, I always did hope for the best, but that doesn't mean that what you hope for will happen. What was missing from my then view of optimism were faith, and the idea that we can have an enormous impact on our own destinies. With that trip to Europe, I began to understand that we must have hope, which the dictionary defines as: "a feeling that what is wanted WILL happen." We also need faith which is defined as "complete trust or confidence." Together with these, we must behave as though we have faith and hope by taking the steps necessary to get what we want.
We've all heard the clichés about attitude: "life is what you make of it;" "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade;" "Happiness is not having what you want BUT wanting what you have." "Let a smile be your umbrella." In the mid-twentieth century, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale wrote the best seller, The Power of Positive Thinking. The idea that our perceptions form our reality is not a new one. The message takes many different forms. For me, it was Dr. Simon's optimist/pessimist comparison that brought the message home. For millions of talk radio listeners the message is best articulated by Dr. Laura Schlessinger who closes each hour by saying, "now go take on the day!"
Perhaps the phrase that best captures the importance of attitude is this: "the circumstances of one's life do not have to dictate the quality of it." I first heard this phrase when I was writing for a gay and lesbian newspaper and I was sent to cover a workshop that was held for people infected with HIV. The point of this workshop was to give people with serious health worries a new way to look at their situation that empowered them to live the rest of their lives with joy and hope. It seemed to have worked. Everyone that I interviewed had been changed by the experience and left the weekend looking forward to the future.
I'm not suggesting that it's easy to be an optimist, a positive thinker, a person who recognizes that the circumstances of one's life don't have to dictate the quality of it. It isn't easy. It's hard work. But it's vital work. Our very lives are quite literally at stake if we don't develop this kind of attitude, for as the bumper sticker says, "life isn't a dress rehearsal." We don't (so far as we know) get to come back and do it again.
Today the orientation to the world that I am advocating is getting harder and harder to cultivate because we live in an age that encourages us to focus on what is wrong rather than what is right and to adopt the role of victim. In the last twenty years there has been an explosion of awareness that abuse and pain are part of many lives. This openness can be very empowering if it is used to raise awareness and ameliorate pain. But unfortunately, too often we are encouraged to let our pain define us and excuse us from making the most of our lives. We use our pain as an excuse to shirk responsibility, wound others, and turn inward.
A woman I know actually introduces herself to people as "an adult child of an alcoholic" and then proceeds to tell them how this situation causes her trouble and pain. Why does she choose to take the most difficult aspect of her life and let THAT be what defines her? Why does she relate to the world from her place of greatest weakness and vulnerability? This woman is also an accomplished career woman and mother of two. Yet these accomplishments take a back seat to her sense of having been wronged and abused as a child. Part of the reason she does this is that her therapist has told her that her parent's alcoholism is the cause of all of her problems. My concern for her is that this orientation to the world causes her to spend her nights cursing the darkness instead of lighting candles. And therapists that encourage us to define ourselves by our pain and weakness are traitors to the cause of helping and healing.
I don't mean to suggest that we should bury our feelings and deny our pain. Healthy processing of pain and grief is a necessary process. But when therapy fails to help us overcome our difficulties and instead encourages us to orient our entire lives around our weakest parts, then it does us and society a great disservice.
To a large extent, the events in our lives have the meaning that we assign them. What may be a life-changing event to one person hardly receives the attention of another. This is why adversity and pain can produce both a Helen Keller and an Adolf Hitler. Hitler turned his personal pain into the most inhumane and evil event in the history of the world. Helen Keller overcame the incredible obstacle of being deaf and blind. She could have cursed the silence and the darkness. Instead, she was as the Buddha said, "a lamp unto herself and thus to all of us." She lived her life with courage, hope, joy and dignity. In a phrase that sums up the way she lived her life, she once said, "If you turn your face toward the sun, you can't see the shadows." We have immense power to define our realities. We can either overcome pain, learn from it and help others, or we can wallow in it, let it define us, and use it as an excuse to wound.
I had an opportunity to view both orientations to the world in my own parents. My poor father never seemed to overcome adversity. Instead he dwelt upon every injustice that he'd ever experienced. If everything couldn't be right, then nothing was right as far as he was concerned. When poor health forced him into early retirement from the police force, he spent his days mourning his loss and plotting his revenge. He would sue them, he vowed, and he did. Nearly two years of his life were consumed by this litigation. Every night at dinner, this was the topic of conversation. I was under ten years old at this time, yet I knew every member of the city council, I understood the union grievance procedure, and I disliked Brian McKeon who sat next to me in school simply because his father was on MY father's villain list. I used to worry that we would starve if my father lost this case because he used to say so every day. Well, he did lose the case. In fact, the judge threw the case out the first day of court. My father's health wouldn't allow him to perform the job. He had been given his pension and social security. He hadn't, the judge said, been wronged by the city.
I now understand that he felt he had been wronged by life and this sense of injustice was confirmed for him when my sister was killed in a car accident. This became the new focus of his days. He wanted revenge on the drunk driver who had caused the accident. He went to the cemetery every day. Now talk of the accident took the place of suing the city at the dinner table every night.
In contrast to my father, stood my mother. She saw to it that my sisters and I had happiness and security. She sang as she went about her work, sat up at night nursing our sick pets, woke us up at midnight to witness the miracle of a lunar eclipse, and found joy in small things like the sweet pea blossoms that covered our fence each spring or a new hymn that we sang at church. My sister's death brought out the best in her. She was devastated as any mother would be. She lost 30 pounds that winter. She cried a lot. But she continued to embrace life and she put the needs of her remaining three children ahead of her own needs.
The accident came just two weeks before Christmas. My father wanted to cancel Christmas that year. But my mother wisely understood that Christmas would come anyway and even though she didn't feel like it, she put up the tree, bought gifts, took us to church and hosted our extended family just like she did every year. Christmas wasn't the same that year, of course. We all cried when it was time to open gifts. But my mother understood that it was vital to her children's future that we see that life does go on in spite of tragedy. That Christmas day, my sisters and I began to trust life again and we say that no matter what our circumstances, there is always something to celebrate. I recall my mother saying that day that she was grateful for the children that she still had and I was enormously grateful and relieved that despite this tragedy, I still had a mother. I had not lost her to eternal grief and despair even though she cried a lot right now. I saw that despite the fact that life had been chaos for a few weeks, things would not remain forever bleak. I began to see that the circumstances of our life didn't have to dictate the quality of it.
Sadly, my father was never able to rise from his despair and I am certain that this contributed to his fatal heart attack a year later. My mother guided us through this tragedy as well and it is because of her attitude that I now think of my childhood as a happy and secure time. My mother remains a vital, active, hopeful person in her sixties now, while this summer we observe the 22nd anniversary of my father's death.
I made a conscious choice to emulate my mother and not my father. I could have adopted my father's despair. But, I can assure you, my mother's hope has been much more sustaining. The circumstances of my life do not and will not determine the quality of it.
We all have this same choice to make. If we have had pain in our lives, it should be processed in the presence of compassionate people who encourage healing. But pain and suffering are to be overcome. They should not become the focal pint of our existence. Dr. Simons taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. It really does all boil down to whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. The optimist understands that the circumstances of her life do not have to dictate the quality of it. The pessimist allows his circumstances to define his life. This may serve him well when things are good. But when problems arise, he will be at their mercy.
In college Psychology, I remember that one of the great theorists we studied said, "if we perceive a situation as real, then it is real in its consequences." Our reality is defined by our perceptions. One of the principles of the post-modern era we now live in is that everyone has a different view of reality. Why not make your reality one in which optimism is the lens through which you look?
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