I used to know someone who went around saying “Optimism, its for the weak.” The sentiment’s not new, the phrase is the title of an LP by the Dark Ambient electronic musicians “Tugend”
I have to agree and disagree with the sentiment, at the same time.
Both optimism and pessimism, in certain forms, may be for the weak. In other ways, both may be useful to maintain.
I think that the key to it all is to be in the middle of it, between hope and fear, between sorrow and naive joy, balanced with our eyes open to life, and the world, seeing both the ugly, and the beautiful, and shrinking from either.
Bouncing between either extreme can lands us in a partial vision of reality, where what truly is, is attenuated by our refusal to actually see what truly is. The other half becomes exaggerated beyond comparison, if we see the glass as half full we minimize its emptiness, if we see it half empty we minimize its fullness.
Watching someone you love, a parent, friend, spouse or lover, pass away before your eyes can be a profoundly wounding thing, but it can also produce in you a sort of liminal state, in which by witnessing death we witness the end state of optimism but also of pessimism. This can be liberating, for what worldly state is worse than death? What do you have to fear other than it?
I think that pessimism can at times be a sort of cowering, ultimately rooted in fear.
In a way, perhaps, so is optimism. Perhaps both are forms of auto-suggestion, in which our minds reproduce what we expect…. not what is.
An old song by Bauhaus. Double dare.
Kind of went a little like this:
“I dare you to be real,
To touch, to touch a flickering flame
the pangs of, the pangs of dark delight
don’t cower, don’t cower in night fright..”
The sentiment interests me. What do we cower from, in life? What do we refuse to admit, either of joy, or sorrow?
In either extremes of pessimism, or optimism.
We should consider this.