The toll road around Chicago had ground into a slow-moving parking lot, and my favorite uncle and I were caught in the middle of it. I was bored and restless, much as any youngster would be. Going to the railroad museum was my idea of fun; sitting in a traffic jam was not. To my surprise, my uncle was having the time of his life. Now that I think about it, it should not have been a surprise. He was always having the time of his life. It was no wonder that years later he was given the Optimist of the Year award. He was not just an eternal optimist – he was an infernal optimist.
“Just look at all these cars! Is this a great nation or what, that so many people own a car? And then look at the design that went into them!” Right away he launched into a monologue about how cars were designed, and how every little piece such as the shape of a door handle or the angle of a window vent had to have the perfect blend of form and function and look good with the rest of the car.
At the time, I thought he was just being long-winded – again. Instead, he was converting a lousy situation into a good one; a life lesson it took a few decades to understand and apply. As I wrote, he was an infernal optimist.
I think we are short of men and women like my uncle. Any fool can become a pessimist. It does not take much effort. Just spend time with other people who are pessimists, add a good dose of national and international news on any subject, and in an amazingly short amount of time, they become a pessimist.
Take for example, the conversation I had with someone just after the James Webb Telescope began sending pictures from the edge of the universe. According to the old sour puss, it was one big expensive waste of money. And it was useless. What good was it to see what was out there when the air transportation system can’t get our luggage from one place to another on a non-stop flight?
Not so much as a syllable about the design and engineering that went into the telescope, or how it was launched to a precise location a million miles away, and how it all worked. No interest whatsoever in the beauty it was capturing in its lenses and then sending back here. Was their awe and wonder at how it all came together? Nope – just sheer pessimism.
That fellow is spreading negativity and pessimism faster than Covid-19 when it was at its most virulent.
It takes a lot of effort to be the antidote to that attitude in life, but we desperately need it. There will never be a job shortage for optimists, and they will never be short of friends who want to spend time with them.
There are plenty of wonderful examples of optimists, if we just tap into them. The taciturn President Coolidge would always begin with a compliment, even if it was just a short, “Nice outfit you have on today,” before telling a secretary that a document needed to be re-typed because of some errors. Dale Carnegie was irrepressible in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People. So was Will Rogers who was famous for saying, “I’ve never met a man I didn’t like” — and meaning it!
Right now, we hear about all the air travel problems at airports and in the skies, but we don’t get that from Rick Steves, the popular host of many televised travel programs. Things might be falling apart around him, but he turns to the audience, smiles, and says something encouraging. Then he pulls the strap to his backpack over his shoulder again and presses on.
All of us get discouraged from time to time. That’s human nature. That’s also when I try to remember the story of the psychologist who had two fellows shovel out a couple of heavily used horse stalls. An hour later he returned, and the first boy was miserably leaning on the shovel and hadn’t done anything. The second boy was furiously shoveling away. When he asked the second fellow who he was working so hard the boy said, “Listen, mister, with all this manure here, there’s got to be a pony down there.”
Your choice – optimist or pessimist. The world will be forever indebted to those who chose to put the emphasis on the positive. They will never be short of friends, and constantly surrounded by admirers who want some of that optimistic energy to rub off on them.
