In a world so bleak and cold, what a rebellion it is to think in the wildly varying warm hues of hope. Sometimes, I fear I am not as optimistic a man, at least not as much as I could be, but then, I look around at all the people around me. I hear them talk as they diminish any sense of warmth in the world, and I realise the error in my judgment. Then, under the heavy air of adversity that has not arrived yet, I watch as they rely on the crutch of religion or some equally outlandish and bothersome idea. I sit there biting my tongue, thinking:
If you keep your heart open, if only you accept that good things exist, and they happen, and they happen more often than the bad things do, you would not need a proverbial stick to lean on. All of you will be bolstered. All of you will be surefooted. Tell me, what good is borrowed faith?
But I continue sitting there until the topic rolls over, or if there are more pressing, urgent concerns on the table, like deciding what to order, accelerated by the server’s arrival, things naturally move to that, and I avoid this absurd confrontation. Yet, it stays with me and rarely do I meet someone who shares this optimism—the quiet kind. My optimism is not about tricking myself. It is simply one of hope. There is the beginning and the end of it. I believe things happen if we try our hand at them, and until we try things, they can’t begin happening. And what of things that happen to us, the curveballs, the unexpected? What of it? Pain occurs, and you do something to it until it feels smaller.
No matter what happens in life, there is something beautiful to look at, something warm to talk about, something of a vivid and loud aesthetic quality to embrace. This is a given. But most people do not look at things this way. They miss out on the serendipity of life. When their misery ends, they have another one to mull over. Over and over, this happens. They do not stare at the sun. They do not walk under its glow. The lengths most people will go to for this exhausts me in a secondhand fashion. I do not know what to do with this feeling.
Anything can happen—that much is true. What most people forget is that this includes the good.