Twixt Optimist and Pessimist

Leo Tolstoy once wrote, "Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them." And I have found this to be so true. I am an optimist, married to a pessimist (although he would call himself a realist...)

It reminded me of the old rhyme, "Twixt optimist and pessimist, the difference is droll: the optimist sees the doughnut, the pessimist sees the hole."

(Aside: don't those look fabulous? One of the many losses of being coeliac is that I can no longer eat doughnuts. Which is a pessimistic way of looking at things, because there are so many nice things I *can* still eat. Interesting!)

So it depends on your point of view. I honestly believe I am happier when I "lean into joy" as Brené Brown puts it. It is a more vulnerable way of living, because (perhaps) optimists are more prone to disappointment. But I would many times rather be disappointed sometimes than to expect the worst all the time.

Tolstoy has a more serious point to make. Because if we pin our happiness on outward things, we become dependent on those other things *for* our happiness. And if something external to ourselves, which we don't have any control over, goes wrong, it can ruin our whole day.

Whereas, if our outlook is determinedly positive, we might be able to find some grain of goodness, happiness, in most things. Like he said, it's all about "how we see them."

Let me give you an example. It so happens that I'm re-reading C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, and have just started Book 6, The Silver Chair. In which one of the main characters is that arch-pessimist, Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle. Who says things like, "The bright side of it is, that if we break our necks getting down the cliff, then we're safe from being drowned in the river." Reading the children's conversations with him always makes me laugh.

But the realist side of his pessimism sometimes comes in useful, as his cautious approach to life saves Jill and Eustace from falling into scrapes, and keeps them grounded. For example, "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one."

And they come to value his wisdom and bravery. As Jill says towards the end of the book, "You're a regular old humbug. You sound as doleful as a funeral and I believe you're perfectly happy. And you talk as if you were afraid of everything, when you're really as brave as - as a lion."

So I guess it does depend on your point of view - we optimists need pessimists to keep us grounded and the pessimists need optimists to cheer them up, or to walk compassionately alongside them. There is room for both kinds of people in the world and in truth, most of us are a mixture.