HEALTHY OPTIMISM
by Cia Ricco

An optimistic attitude is vital to our happiness and well-being. Yet you may notice resistance to optimism because you focus on the problems in the world or in your life and feel that optimism means giving up those concerns and becoming unrealistic. What is the difference between optimism and an unrealistic Pollyanna-like view of the world? How can we develop a healthy outlook without ignoring the problems and living on cloud nine?

Yes, optimism is important. It is equally important to know where to invest your optimism. Everything in life can be divided into two categories: What you can control or do something about and what you can't. Until we know how to distinguish which is which, we waste a lot of energy on frustration and unhappiness. Practice carefully sorting the areas of your life which have been receiving your attention. The more carefully you sort, the more likely you are to notice that the things you can really affect are quite limited. You can control your attitude, your words, and your actions. Everything else is just the way it is. You can't control your partner's attitude, words, or actions, nor the attitudes, words and actions of anyone else. Sure, you may be able to influence them, but the investment in trying to do so is so considerable that it is wise to pick your battles very carefully and make sure the rewards are worth it. If you don't like the political situation you can get out there and campaign, but be realistic about the fact that nothing substantial might change and you may have spent your allotment of time and energy.

What does this have to do with optimism? Everything. As I said, the important thing is to know where to place it. I am optimistic about the things I can really affect because I am confident in my ability to affect them for the good. My optimism further enhances my ability to affect my attitude, words, and actions positively, and as I affect them positively I further boost my optimism, in a self-reinforcing positive spiral. The fringe benefit of this cycle is that I feel good about myself and, when I feel good about myself, I tend to see the world in a more positive light (optimistically). I know that the world is a mess and has all kind of problems. As a therapist, I get to hear horrendous stories of suffering every day. And after thirty years of Buddhist studies and practice, I've got the First Noble Truth down pat: Life is suffering. Yet I am an optimist! Because my experience of the world can only be subjective, when I am happy, the world (for me) is a happy place.

And that brings us to the subject of projection. We can debate, ad infinitum, whether or not the world is this or that, happy or miserable, black or white, or whether Anne Frank, that incurable optimist, was right when she decided against all odds that people were basically good, or whether or not it was a good thing (for her) that she felt that way. In the end all these debates will be academic. You see the world through your eyes. What you see is inevitably colored by your experiences and finally by your attitudes as you derive them from your experiences. You project onto the world, in much the same way a film projector projects the images on the film (the experiences and interpretation) onto the screen (of life). If you are angry, the world looks like an angry place. When you are sad or lonely, it seems a sad and lonely place. When you are afraid, the world appears scary and unsafe. When you are filled with joy, the world is joyous. So which would you rather be? You can't change the world, but you can change your attitude. Do you believe it? Invest your energy in your outlook and see what happens.

We tend to get what we believe. It is a universal law that we tend to magnetize to ourselves what we are expecting. This can be seen most clearly in other people. Look around you and notice what sort of things tend to show up in the lives of people you know. See if you notice that the kind of things they predicted or expected are the kind of things they wound up getting for better or worse. The same is true of you. If you don't like what's showing up in your life, take a close look at what you expect. This discovery makes a really good case for developing healthy optimism!

Claiming responsibility for your life (your attitudes, words, and actions and the resulting effect on your life) is an important way to keep grounded in healthy optimism. When something goes wrong, I look for three things: to see if there was some way in which I contributed to it, what I can learn from it, and what I can do about it. By doing this, I do not lapse into the poor me victim position which characterizes most pessimism. Likewise, by relying on myself to be the creator of my life, I also avoid the other extreme of expecting to be taken care of by life, Deus Ex Machina style. I don't rely on oracles or trust in the universal flow to solve the problems that exist. It s not that there is anything wrong with oracles or with trust and faith. Rely is the operative word. Isn't there a saying that God helps she who helps herself ?

So, how do we deal with disillusionment? It is important to address that because one of the primary reasons people resist optimism is the fear that disillusionment will follow and that the pain and disappointment will be so great that it is better to go through life expecting the worst in order to protect ourselves from that disappointment. The unfortunate fact that we might as well recognize right now is that expecting the worst is no protection at all against disappointment. In fact, if you believe anything you have read here so far, you may see that expecting the worse is most likely a cause of unhappiness and may even increase the odds that the worst will happen.

Now, don't let's get superstitious here. There is nothing wrong with occasionally rehearsing a worst case scenario in your mind: imagining the death of a loved one, or the loss of a physical capacity, or a terminal illness for example. Running a scenario in your mind does not bring about the event. These kind of mental rehearsals are perfectly natural and probably healthy if you focus not on the horror, but on the recovery and how you would cope, thereby reinforcing your own belief that you could cope with anything. If you find yourself obsessing, living with the expectation, or convincing yourself that you couldn't handle it, that's a different matter.

Disappointment is a fact of life. When you recognize your capacity to feel your feelings, including disappointment, sadness, and grief, and survive them, you won't have to go through life bearing the much greater burden of guarding against the possibility of feeling. Guarding against disappointment and disillusionment substantially diminishes your capacity for joy and for the full experience of all that life has to offer. The awareness that life is full of suffering and healthy optimism are not mutually exclusive. When you can hold both of them, you have opened yourself to a life rich with unlimited possibilities.