Recently, I’ve seen people commenting how we can’t afford to be optimistic about winning in November. And I’m not the only one. Just this weekend GoodNewsRoundup had this to say in their Saturday Good News Roundup:
However, week after week people post “lets not get complacent” in the comments because the assumption is that people will see that there are reasons to be hopeful about the election and will decide not to work hard.
Though people often confuse the two, optimism is not complacency. Optimism is not believing that something is in the bag and therefore nothing more needs to be done, it is seeing the opportunity in every difficulty and working to make the most of things as they come. We can’t do that without optimism and its cousin, hope.
Consider the story of Pandora and her jar, which contained all manner of blessings1 from the Olympians unto humanity, until the jar was opened out of curiosity and almost all the blessings were lost. The only one which remained in the jar was hope, which was eventually bequeathed unto all of us.
Hope is what allows us to keep going even in the face of terrible travails. When people lose hope, they quit trying to make things better, and instead distract themselves from the difficulties they face. Or worse, fall into despondence and despair. Neither is a productive way to make things better.
Someone who is truly optimistic and hopeful will never say “it’s in the bag, so we don’t have to do anything further”. Far from it — optimism and hope only come when we face our problems and recognize that they are surmountable, so long as we keep working at them.
You see, we all have our own version of Pandora’s jar that we carry with us. We all have the hope that she managed to keep from escaping her jar. And as long as we don’t let that hope out of our own jars, we can do amazing things with it.
Indeed, we already have. We successfully ousted Citizen Trump from the presidency because of our hope, our optimism, that we could do that, which led to us working our butts off to accomplish that goal. If we had not done so, he could very well have won outright then. That’s why optimism and hope are so important — because if we don’t have them, we let opportunities slip through our fingers just because they are difficult.
So be optimistic and hopeful that we will again keep him out of the presidency in November, and use those feelings to work hard to make sure it happens.
1I’m aware that the traditional version of the story has the jar containing all the wickedness and evils in the world, but this has never made a lot of sense to me given the nature of hope, which allows us to keep working hard even in the face of disaster and catastrophe. If the jar was full of evil and wickedness, why have something that allows us to keep working in the face of all that also in the jar?