August 2, 2011

• Playing With Horse Poo

   

   

  My principal would always tell a story of two boys: one an optimist, the other, a pessimist. Around Christmas, their parents decided to test them. For the pessimist, they bought all the best toys; for the optimist, a bucket of horse dung. Christmas morning, they peeked in on the boys as they unwrapped the gifts. The pessimist would unwrap a toy, examine it,play with it for a few seconds, then declare something was wrong with it and move on to the next toy, never happy about any of them. The optimist, however, was throwing the horse poop all around, leaping and jumping, bursting with excitement. When the parents asked him why, he proudly declared,”With all this poo, there must be a pony somewhere!!”

  Cute, I know. But he always left out what the boy said when he discovered there was no pony.

  See,I’ve always been a kinda middle of the road guy: not too optimistic, but not a pessimist either. Let’s look at my writings, for example. For the optimistic side, we’ve got  A Hero, Silver Flowers. For the not-so-optimistic side, we’ve got Drifting, and Sleepless Night (which is almost a picture of this post, I’ll explain later). Then there were some that could’ve gone either way (Silver Flowers was one, as was Morning)

  I call it being realistic. I’ll get my hopes up, but usually only for something that’s for the most part guaranteed. It’s kept me emotionally safe. Usually, when I get optimistic about something, I try to calm it down, because the only times I’ve been blindly optimistic, I’ve been hurt. It happened recently, not bad, but enough to help me remember not to do it again. There’s this girl I know. I like her, but not in love with her. Her friend told me she liked me, but we’re both heading off to college soon, so I was gonna leave it alone. But she, being an optimist, told me to talk to her. Another friend, also an optimist, encouraged me too. At first, I was against it, but they kept prodding, and the friend filled my head with great things this girl said about me. So I let myself think like them. I mean, if she liked me so much, what could go wrong? I even thought ahead to after we talked and tried to make plans for a first date before we left. When I talked to her, she told me she didn’t know me good enough and didn’t want a relationship during the first year of college anyway. Instead of listening to myself and leaving it alone, I got optimistic and went out on a limb. I wasn’t expecting the branch to break, but it did.

  You see, you cannot predict the future. You cannot tell me everything will be ok, all my dreams will come true, one day I’ll live happily forever after, and all those other Disney-encouraged false promises. Life isn’t a fairy tale. Bad things happen. There will be times everything will not turn out alright. I agree everything happens for a reason, and if we allow Him, God will make it for our good. But He never says it’ll be easy. He actually tells us not to brag about what will happen tomorrow because we don’t know what will actually happen.

  So for me, optimism is just a way of setting yourself up for disappointment. Playing with horse poo, and there really is no pony. Sure, it may work for other people. But I don’t have the best of luck, so I’ll just stick to realism.

   

  • 11:26 pm
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