Optimism and pessimism

Someone once told me a parable at some motivational seminar eons ago and it went something like this:

Two separate rooms, one had a horse in it and another, a metre high of manure (a.k.a. shit). Now, if you put a pessimistic child in the one with the horse, he goes “Urgh, no! A horse, that means there’ll be a lot of manure to deal with”. Put in an optimistic child in the room filled with manure and he’ll go “Wahoo! Where’s there’s manure, there’s bound to be a horse in here somewhere!”

Now, I’m not sure whether that story had and bearing on myself through the years, but nowadays, I can get pretty optimistic if I wanted to. And thankfully, at times like these when inflation is at an all time high and everyone seems to be struggling just to make ends meet, optimism seems to be the only good thing that’s left. It’s either that or to resign ourselves to well… nothingness.

But then that would really be a very sad state of affair if one has to live a life that’s nothing more than mere existence, devoid of anything that’s remotely good that one can achieve. After all, given the billions of odds for each one of us to be conceived from our mother’s womb to experience this world and to have that just thrown away because we’re having a rather hard life to contend with… that’s just not right.

See, what I’m just trying to say is that we all average what they call “three scores and ten” years of life, that is, about 70 years, give and take a few. Now that adds up to approximately 20,000 days only. It’s quite little if you think about it seriously.

So, ultimately, we have to decide whether we honestly want to throw away our lives because it’s just not cut out to be what we’ve expected or force ourselves to be optimists. Yes, I said force ourselves. I don’t believe that optimism is a birthright. It is something that’s learned and developed over time. It is something that’s there to help us make sense of a senseless world.

It’s having the knack to want to see the silver lining in every darkened cloud… regardless. It’s about telling yourself that though you might never find a horse after plough-ing through that metre high manure, you might even find bio-diesel (aka. compost and refined manure). Now at a time when petrol prices top USD140 a barrel, hell… that manure’s definitely worth more as manure than as merely horse dung or even the horse itself.