Recently there has been much debate on the Farmers Weekly Forum about the prospects for 2012, and whilst some are optimistic others are not. My own view is that one may as well be optimistically hopeful, as life is short and the time for pessimistic regret will be an eternity.
Many years ago my girl friend (later my wife) and I set out on a motor bike to visit friends in Birmingham. Now to folks like me a big city is like a foreign planet and one street looks pretty much like another. We had no map, only an address and a vague sense that their house was in the south central part of the city.
Despite the cold, dark rainy February night I halted at a bus stop and optimistically asked a young woman the way. She was with her elderly mother but kindly offered to put us right and so started to describe in words and actions where we should go. All went well until the point where she was looking one way but both her arms were pointing in opposite directions. It was then that her mother intervened and said, “Oh do stop it Phyllis, I’ll tell them, it’s nowhere near were you say.” The aged mother then proceeded to give us alternative instructions but, just as I had tuned in to her broad Brummy accent, the daughter roughly pushed her aside and, in a raised voice, said, “How can you tell them it’s that way when you’ve never ever been to Edgbaston.”
I sensed that things were beginning to turn nasty and so I murmured to the girlfriend, “hang on,” and gently revving the engine moved away from the kerb-side leaving the combatants in full argumentative flow. To this day I am convinced they never saw us leave.
Not for the first time has my optimism when seeking directions been disappointed, yet I remain stubbornly optimistic.
The opposite of optimism is often though to be pessimism and there is no doubt that in a crisis we are more inclined to want to be around optimists than pessimists. Given our present national crisis therefore, can we expect sermons of confidence and hope from our Bishops and messages of positive optimism from our national leaders? I do hope we are not to be disappointed by either group.
I wonder however, if both optimism and pessimism are really only states of mind and that we ourselves decide whether to be one or the other. If this is the case then a sermon I once heard from my Great Uncle George makes perfect sense. In it he said that, “Hope is a gift of God,” and then went on to quote St Paul who must have thought the same because he once said, “Without hope, I am of all men, most miserable.”
My Great Uncle George was a jolly fellow who must also have been an optimist because he read the Daily Herald up until his death, and I seem to remember him saying that, “If he had been around at the time, St Paul would have also been a Daily Herald reader.” This speculation caused a family problem however because his brother, my grandfather, felt that St Paul was more likely to have been a Daily Telegraph man.
Psychologists who try to explain how our minds work tell us that some people have a greater natural tendency to optimism than others. This view sounds reasonable, and might explain why an old friend of mine still optimistically thinks that he is pretty well immune to the affects of alcohol.
Some years ago he had been drinking heavily in Chesterfield and, as he had had previous brushes with the law, decided to leave his car at the pub and take a bus home.
He later proudly told magistrates that he arrived home safely and without incident although it was he said, much to the surprise of his wife, as he had never driven a bus before.
View from the Pew 