Yes, I am optimistic. Well, rather, I am being optimistic during this period. And you have to be very careful with the verb to be, as it leads us to a closed, static and unalterable definition of ourselves. It is better for me to be being, which is more in line with the flow of life. Since life is something dynamic, unpredictable and always going forward. Trying to cling to a belief about ourselves, about reality or about how things should be, is like trying to make a river go backwards or putting doors to the field; it does not work. Clinging to what we were or what worked, that is, resisting the constant change that is life is the best way to embitter it.
And I am optimistic, not because I believe or not that the situation will improve, but because I have chosen to be. Yes, optimism is an attitude, and therefore it is something we can choose from. Nobody can stop us; nor can anyone give it to us or impose it on us.
Optimism is not a positive judgment about how things are going to happen, it is a decision of what I want to do to make things happen. How I want to build my reality. What color and what possibilities do I want to give it? Yes, reality is individual, each one of us constructs it based on how we observe it and how we interpret what happens.
Whether what happens is good or bad is something that we judge, it is not in the event itself. It will be good if it opens possibilities for me and bad if it closes them. But it happens that in most cases, I have no certainty or hint of what the future will bring me, so building a hypothesis or the opposite is nothing more than my decision. And for the same price I prefer to build the good one, the one that opens up possibilities for me: that's why I'm optimistic.
This optimism also has a characterological component, I admit it, and they even remind me that I use it even in a pathological way. Well, I am in the process of making such a choice not a covert (and automatic / unconscious) way of running away from pain (which makes it a conscious non-choice).
Incluso coyunturalmente ahora soy optimista. Reconozco que hasta hace poco tenía una visión bastante catastrofista de la realidad. Estaba convencido de que la espiral de consumo, individualismo y desconexión con nuestra parte animal iba acabar fagocitándonos a nosotros mismos. Vamos que íbamos a ser la plaga del planeta que iba a acabar consigo misma (y con muchas especies más). Que no íbamos a ser más que una ligera pesadilla en la inmensidad de la vida en el planeta tierra. Pero ahora he encontrado señales que me hacen modificar dicha visión.
I see around me signs of a recovery in humanistic thinking. From a search for values. From a return to natural principles (and it is not necessary to invent anything new), where in addition to our thinking we are recovering our emotionality, our corporeality (we are body) and our spirituality (purpose in life).
A holistic view of the person. But also a holistic vision of groups of people: organizations, companies, families… etc. And these visions come from very diverse fields: oriental wisdom, medicine, psychology, sociology, management, quantum physics, basic science… etc. It is and will be a slow and difficult path, like a silent re-evolution, but one that I sense is underway.
But what makes me more optimistic is that for all that to happen it is only necessary that I want it. Yes, it all starts with a personal decision. As Aldous Huxley says "There is a tiny point in the universe that only you can improve and that is yourself." Gandhi also says it - "Become the change you want to see in the world."
In a complex and interrelated world, systems theory tells us that the flapping of a butterfly can trigger a storm thousands of kilometers away.
How do you know that this action that only you can do will not be the flutter necessary to change the world? Therein lies the key, in taking responsibility for our part of solving the problem.
Of course, it is much better if we do it from the Game and Lightness, faithful companions on this path of change that is life.
PS I know that many of you will think that they are nothing more than good intentions, but that's what I'm optimistic about, to have good intentions.
Here are other links to optimism
De Julen: optimism and work, luck and happiness
And another by Lucy MacDonald Do you think like an optimist?
