Hope Floats

I love Ben's blog. I only check it about once a week but I almost always find a gem there.  In his post, Do You Believe Tomorrow Has the Potential to Be Better Than Today?, there was a bolded quote from a New York Times article which said, "Optimists see the passing of time as a canvas on which to paint a better world."

As I have aged, I have become much more optimistic. However, it is still easy for me to get lost in the pit of despair. It is so simple to imagine things falling apart and the subsequent downward spiral into decay. My post on the state of federal funding for biomedical research was sliding down this slope.  I am surrounded by colleagues who expound daily on how bad it is now and how much worse it will get in the future. It is so simple to get caught up in it and so incredibly difficult to get people out of this mindset.

I also struggle with finding my optimism when I fear I have gotten on the wrong path. When I am uncertain whether I am heading in the correct direction. I really did not want to go to Abilene. And yet, when I pull out of my despair (my feeling that nothing I can do will make a difference) and choose to act or redirect myself to the correct path, I feel the hope begin to bubble inside.  For me, my optimism is directly tied to how much control I think that I  have in a situation. Although I sometimes forget it, how I feel or react to a situation is always in my control. It has taken me a very long time to learn this. But when I remember, I can almost always create at least fragile bubble of optimism around me.

Comments

[Hui Zhou]

I recently has been reading Toni Turner's book on short-term stock trading, one thing I learned so far is -- stop tring to control what you can't control.

We all naturally hope to control a situation, and many time bend our view to fit into our hope. We are very good at mind job, so it often conceals the fact that often things are actually out of our control. And when that fact conflicts to our hope too much, hope slides into despair.

After I mentally stops to control the world, my current objective is just to spot the shape or trend of the "world", and find a place that I can fit in. Not necessarily a place that has to be on a up trend, rather a place that I fits comfortably. And the realization that the "world" is actually so big and has so many choices that I can fit in comfortablly gives me ultimate optimism even after I realized how volatile this "world" changes.

[Hui Zhou]

An idiom I often cites to my wife -- "When you reach the mountain, you will find a road".