A defense of worrywarts, pessimists, nay-sayers, and those who see that part of the glass is indeed quite empty!
It is a terrible and tragic clash that happens every day in living rooms, boardrooms, business offices and dorms across the county. The optimist and the pessimist bump heads.
Sara - sweet and bubbly Sara - comes into the kitchen from her morning jog. "It's beautiful out there!" she announces to Steve who's sitting at the table carefully catching up on all the terrible news of the day. "Let's drop everything and take the kids to the zoo today," she says! "We could stop at the grocery on the way and get stuff for a picnic afterwards."
Steve looks up, slowly. Sara can see the wheels in his head turning. "But what about the kids' soccer practice?" he says. "We don't want the coach to think we aren't committed. I mean, they already missed one practice a week ago. And it's still pretty cold for a picnic, are you sure we shouldn't check the weather forecast first? And come to think of it, I'm not sure that we renewed our zoo membership, maybe we should call first to double check. While we are at it, let's not forget to ask if the elephant exhibit is still running. If not, we may want to re-think things, honey; you know how disappointed Tommy gets when he can't see the elephants do their tricks."
Kaaren...I mean Sara. is now no longer bubbly. "Why do you do that?!" she says without the least bit effort to hide her annoyance. "Is it that you just can't help yourself or is it, in some sick way, fun for you to rain on everybody's parade? You're such a pessimist! Good God, I'm talking about a fun day at the zoo and you're over there putting on your FEMA jacket planning for a disaster!"
Across town, the situation isn't any better. Bob and Jack have a major presentation in less than an hour. Big shot clients have flown in from San Diego to hear their pitch. Confident and charismatic, Jack is sitting at his desk with his feet up. A miniature New York Knicks basketball hoop hangs on the wall right directly above the trash bin. He carefully aims the tiny orange ball in his hands and lets it go. Swoooosh. All net!
Right then, Bob, Jack's partner, comes rushing in. "Please look this over will you?" he says nervously. "It's a handout I just typed up. I am going to make copies of it to give out in case something goes wrong with the projector or PowerPoint presentation."
Jack laughs. "You don't stop do you? Really, Bob, you've got to give it a rest my friend." Jack's voice both slows and gets louder, in that wonderfully condescending way we all talk to children, the hard of hearing and those who look different than us. "Nothing is going to go wrong with the projector," says, Jack. "Nothing has ever gone wrong with the projector. You're getting yourself worked up into a frenzy. And if you're not careful, friend, your going to get both of us worked up into a frenzy. Then all the clients are going to see is two nervous nellies. And who would want to hire a crew like that?! Just chill will ya. We're ready. We are the best firm for the job. We're brilliant. We're creative. And we are good looking to boot! They will love us!! Don't go messing things up with your worrying!"
And finally, no more than two miles away, at the local community college, Jennifer and Joan are eating lunch together. Both are honor students. It's 11am. At noon, they have their Asian Studies final. "Ohhhhh," whines Joan, "I should have spent more time going over the Ming dynasty. I focused too much on the earlier stuff. I always do that!! I let myself get too interested in one or two things and never get around to memorizing it all. I just know most of the questions will end up being about the Ming dynasty, I just know it!"
Jennifer looks up, "I don't get you sometimes. Girl, what you need to be doing right now is getting yourself psyched up, not beating your self down. Anyway, it's too late to do anything about it. And hello, nobody gets around to memorizing it all! It's not your fault if the Ming stuff comes up. Murphy's law, you know. I just don't understand how you can be so smart and still think so poorly of yourself. It's just weird, girl. Just weird!"
Now did you hear that, my dear pessimistic friends? Weird. That's right. That's what they call us. That's what they think of us. Weird.
And before I go any further, let me be clear, and do it with an apology to the optimists out there this morning. Optimists, you're going to feel a bit excluded from the conversation today. You see, I've decided we worrywarts need to have a chat among ourselves. But that doesn't mean we don't want you to listen in. Indeed, I think it's about time you optimists had a chance to hear things from our side.
Because it's not easy being a pessimist. Isn't that right, my dear glass-half-empty comrades? I mentioned the word worrywart; that actually is one of the kinder words these optimists use for us, isn't it? We're annoying. We're downers. We're the ones who bring the black cloud into the room and put a damper on all the dreaming. Something's just sadly wrong with us, they secretly whisper among themselves. After all, they say, why would anyone choose to be miserable when they could decide instead to look on the bright side and be in a happy mood? (And I know for a fact that this is the conversation they secretly have because I hear my cheery, can-do wife and her sister talking about me and my sensibly cautious brother-in-law all the time!)
And we're not just annoying, worse: they consider us a threat. They've even, in a sense, turned the whole country against us. Indeed, the only thing worse than being a communist or atheist in America, is being a pessimist!! True Americans believe the sky is the limit. Real Americans look on the bright side and pull themselves up by their bootstraps: they don't sit down for a moment, loosen their tie and worry about what might go wrong. No, in America, pessimism is the enemy of the possible - plain and simple. So thou shalt weed it out. Indeed, of all the unspoken commandments of American cultural religion, this is surely commandment number one.
And it's in this sense that those sunny-side friends of ours have made it into a moral thing. (They are very clever in this way!) America has a history of being puritanical about sexual matters, but one can easily make a case that the greatest American sin of all is to not believe in yourself. Just think how they sainted the likes of Norman Vincent Peale and Mr. Rogers. Thank goodness, they shout, Norman saved America from negative thoughts about the future and Mr. Rogers purified our kids from those infectious worries that they might not be perfect "just the way they are."
Oh, friends, the optimists just don't understand how traumatic it's been for us - having had to grow up all our lives knowing that we are on Mr. Rogers hit list!
But the worst part - worse than being on that hit list - is having people blind to the fact that it isn't even necessary to put us on a hit list of any kind. If only we could get all those half-glass full folk out there to understand that we don't need to be eliminated, cured, corrected, quarantined or whatever else they keep imagining needs done to us.
And thus, this sermon. We pessimists need to unite! We need an "I'm a Pessimist and Proud of It!" movement - complete with bumper stickers, t-shirts and a massive public education campaign correcting all those myths that are out there about us! (Can I hear an amen?!)
And the first myth that we need to deal with is the notion that our negative thoughts are self-defeating, that they somehow paralyze us or lead us to run away from doing what needs to be done.
Optimists always seem to lump all of us seemingly gloomy folks together. Have you noticed this? I don't know why this is; maybe optimists are just too blinded by their happiness to notice or make crucial distinctions. But regardless of the reason, optimists seem to assume we are all Eeyores. But we pessimists know - right? - that Eeyore is just one, quite particular breed of pessimist. He's the "avoider pessimist." He's the one that sees one cloud in the sky and turns right around and shuts the door. Any sign of trouble evokes an automatic flight response in him.
Now there's not doubt that Eeyores exist among our cloudy clan, but we know that the vast majority of us aren't Eeyore's at all; we aren't "avoider pessimists." We are "defensive pessimists." We're on the lookout for that cloud just as much as Eeyore is; but when we see it, we don't run and hide, instead we instinctively respond by creating a defensive plan. We go back inside the house, not to stay away from the picnic, BUT TO PREPARE! We gather our umbrella, our boots and pack soup rather than sandwiches, knowing that you can still eat soup when it rains but nobody eats soggy sandwiches!
So you see, our negative thinking - our worrying about the clouds and whether the zoo is open or the elephant is ready to do his tricks - all this is not us trying to set up roadblocks or to make excuses. No, it's part of our highly-developed, multi-faceted, comprehensive process of getting prepared so we can go out. (See, isn't our way of describing it so much better then theirs?!)
In short, what we've got to help the optimists understand is that we don't use our worries to defeat ourselves! Far from it. We use them to enable ourselves - and others! - to have the best time possible.
But can you hear them? We know what they are thinking right now. They're sitting out there, thinking, "Yeah, but it's not just that you worry about life, you're also constantly putting yourself down. You're constantly being self-critical. And that clearly is self-defeating! You can't deny that you all have this strange lack of self-confidence!"
Now pessimists, stay calm; we need to have patience with them. They are very stuck in their ways, those optimists are. They don't mean to be so judgmental; it's not their fault that our self-confidence is so much more subtle, sophisticated and complex than theirs is!
It helps, I think, to take them back to my hypothetical story about the college student who was chewing herself out before a test. Her optimistic friend saw this only as self-deprecation and an example of strange low self-esteem. But that's not it at all, right? Sure a small number of pessimists criticize themselves in a way that reinforces feelings of worthlessness, but for most of us pessimists, our self-criticism is really an expression of our self-confidence. This hard to explain - especially to optimists - so remember to go very slowly when talking to them.
The important part is to get optimists to see that this student was identifying the flaws in her preparation not to create anxiety, but to control it. She wasn't putting herself down as much as she was proactively and preemptively getting the "beat myself up part" out of the way so she wouldn't have to deal with it during the test. What to her optimistic friend looked like a last minute crisis of confidence was in truth our uniquely pessimistic way of taking control of the situation! I mean, we know ourselves. We know that we are going to beat ourselves up no matter what. But we'll be darned if we are going to let those pesky negative thoughts choose their own timeline and mess up our test!
Now does that sound like a passive, low self-esteem, pitiful quitter to you?! ["NO!"] You're darn right it's not. And the proof is that it works. Recent research verifies this.
Research, by the way, is an especially helpful tool when trying to enlighten optimists. They like research - largely because it has for so long focused solely on the benefits of their positive thinking. Indeed, up until recently optimists were the golden boys and girls of the research world. But now, luckily for us, researchers are a little less starstruck and a little more open to noticing the ways that our negative thinking also has its upside, at least for us.
For instance, one study that has received a lot of attention took a bunch of college age pessimists and divided them into two groups. They all were given a standardized aptitude test, a challenging test but it easily matched their educational level. The first group of pessimists were asked before the test to predict their performance. Like good pessimists they set their expectations low, and then launched off from there into their usual talk about all the reasons they might not perform as well as others.
Now the second group of pessimists wasn't given a chance before the test to go through their usual process of anticipatory worry and self-deprecation. Instead the researchers told this second group of pessimists that after looking over everyone's records it was clear that everyone would surely do well - effectively forcing an optimistic self-assessment on them.
The result? The second group did.just fine. But the first group - the group left to their defensively pessimistic, pre-game worries and self-flagellation? They did exceedingly well!!
The conclusion? (and not just of this study but also a growing number of others): forcing optimism on a pessimist doesn't empower them to better tap into their potential, it simply disables a key component of their usual preparation strategy, a preparation strategy that in all cases - academic tests, professional success and relationship satisfaction - allows pessimists to succeed as well as, if not more so, than optimists.
Now did you hear that? Did you hear what one of them just mumbled under their breath: "But are you really happy?!" They are something else aren't they?
But it's good a thing. Our "Proud Pessimist" movement needs to take this head on. It's clearly the myth most in need of dispelling. Because, as we know, it just simply is not true that we glass-half-empty folks are unhappy and miserable.
And I think the best way to do dispel this myth is to remind the optimists about that wonderful thing called projection.
Once again, research helps us out here. Studies now show that it is actually the optimists who have the problem being anxious and happy at the same time. It seems that when an optimist is forced to think about all the troubles that might occur, he or she automatically reports being in a bad mood. Not so with us. When you engage a pessimist in a discussion about their flaws or a potential crisis in their lives, we still report being happy. Granted, it is not a number super high on the happy scale, but nevertheless we rarely report being in a bad mood when worrying.
The reason for this, scientists have now shown, is that optimists and pessimists are literally born into two radically different inner worlds. For pessimists, low-level anxiety is there from the start, and it remains our constant dance partner for the rest of our lives. Now, this of course sounds awful to the optimists, but that is only because the inner world into which they are born is worry-free. Happiness for them becomes a matter of ditching anxiety as a dance partner and getting back to their blissful status quo.
Researchers call this life-time partner of the pessimists: "hyper threat sensitivity." And it's actually quite helpful, when you think about it, they say. We pessimists have this natural radar, this built-in intuition - so to speak - to notice and to look out for trouble. We don't have to do anything to earn this gift, it's just there, given to us right from the start. We are born with this remarkably cool ability that automatically identifies and helps us eliminate a lot of our blind spots.
Now, the downside is, of course, that we can't turn this radar off. It is always on. In other words, we don't know what it is like to live without threat alerts. We are sort of always on guard, always slightly anxious. Thus happiness for us becomes something entirely different than the happiness of the optimist. Happiness for us isn't a matter of ditching anxiety as a dance partner; it is a matter of taking the lead, spinning and guiding our worries so that they help us think of what must be done. In other words, our ups and downs depend on how we are dancing with worries, not whether or not we are dancing with them.
Understanding this, I think, makes it easier to see why it is so hard for the optimists to figure us out. They simply don't have our gift! They are not blessed with a radar system that is highly sensitive to threats. Their gift is different; They're born with a radar system attuned to possibility, thus their regular dance partner is dreams. They are love-struck in a sense, and easily tend not even to notice that threats or flaws are on the dance floor.
And maybe, therein lays the most important message of the day. One dancing over here with worry, the other over there dancing with dreams - with us needing them both. And not just on the dance floor, but also inside ourselves.
Beyond all the teasing and taking sides this morning, my true hope today is not simply that optimists will appreciate pessimists, but that somehow our appreciation of one another will enable each other's emotional strategies to leak across the divide.
What made Martian Luther King Jr. so valuable to the world, for instance, was not simply that he had a dream, but that he was constantly haunted by and couldn't stop thinking about a great deal of worries. We live in a world now that seems overly willing to talk of dreams, but quite unwilling to deal with worries.
And I'm not so sure that our unwillingness to face those worries has as much to do with their gargantuan size - think of the war or AIDS or the environmental crisis or poverty - as it has to do with us lacking the ability to dance with dreams and worry at the same time.
In my reading about "defensive pessimists" this past couple of weeks this is what struck me most. They are not - the researchers say - the opposite of optimists, as much as they are folks who seem able to be both optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. Hopeful and worried all at once. One researcher called them "Happy Worriers!"
How about that for a T-shirt logo?!
And not just for us pessimists, but for us optimists as well.
Happy Worrier. In a worry-free culture - and even in a wonderful church that pushes the optimistic gamble of risk and boldness all the time - a little "happy worrying" may indeed be exactly what we need.
I'll be taking t-shirt sign up after the service.
Amen.
CLOSING WORDS
Closing Words
Whatever we can dread, or dream we can dread, let us fret about it.
Worry has genius, and power, and magic in it.
May we ever be cautious, thoughtful and prepared.in our living and in our loving.
Amen.(A play on our usual closing words:
Whatever we can do, or dream we can do, let us begin it.
Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
May we ever be bold in our living and in our loving.
Amen)
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