The Best Book Is yet To Be Written…
For absolutely no particular reason, I was feeling a little low the other day. It happens. And whenever it does, I find myself remembering a philosophy professor from many years ago. She had a line she seemed to carry around with her, almost like a personal prayer: “The best book is yet to be written. The best song is yet to be sung. And the days ahead are full of peace.” At that time, I thought she was simply teaching us to “look on the bright side.” She was a born optimist, I understand it differently now. She wasn't asking us to pretend that difficult things don't exist, she was reminding us that the present is never the complete story… Perhaps that is one of the quietest powers an optimistic mind possesses. It leaves room for what has not happened yet. We often make our problems larger simply by staring at them. Have you ever noticed this? A problem arrives, you started to think about it, and you think about it harder. Then you imagine what might happen if it gets worse. And the next thing you know is, you’re replaying the conversations to construct few possible future outcomes around it. Somewhere along the way, you are no longer dealing with the original problem. You are now dealing with the problem plus everything your imagination has built around it. The mind is remarkably good at this. Give it a small stone and, if you keep turning it over long enough, it can make the stone feel like a mountain. Optimism works differently. Optimism doesn't necessarily make the mountain disappear, it simply reminds you to look beyond it. It simply reminds you to look beyond it. There may be another road, another version of tomorrow. Today’s anxiety can’t see that, yet. The small shift from “This is the end of the road” to “I wonder what else is possible” can change the emotional architecture of an individual. I guess hope is a way of looking and not a feeling. For a moment, think about a person you know who seems to recover from life's disappointments faster than others. They aren't necessarily luckier. They aren’t the luckiest, they also may have lost people They may have lost people. As anyone else, failure might not be intimately new to them. But somehow, after the storm, they look for the window. That is optimism. Neither denial, nor naivete. Not pretending that pain isn’t painful. It is the stubborn human belief that, what is happening now does not have to determine what happens next. Who understand this, seem to possess an extraordinary spaciousness even when life gives them very little room. They don't spend all their emotional energy arguing with yesterday. They leave some of it available for tomorrow. They leave some of their emotional energy available for tomorrow, without spending it on arguments, with yesterday. There is something else I have learned. When we become pessimistic, we tend to look backward and inward: Why did this happen? Why me? What if it gets worse? What did I do wrong? Sometimes those questions are necessary. However, if we live inside them too long, they become a room without windows. ‘What might still be possible?’ Notice the tiny word still, it contains an entire philosophy of life.** That’s how an optimistic question sounds. You may have lost something. Still, something may be possible. A relationship may have become distant. Still, perhaps a conversation remains. This maybe the reason why my professor's words stayed with me for so many years. She was refusing to let the present, convince me that, it was the future. It wasn’t a promise of a perfect future, it’s a very different thing. Because sometimes the first act of optimism is allowing yourself to believe that another possibility exists. So, I am curious, what book are you going to start writing. Until tomorrow, Bob
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