Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard.
Do not let pain make you hate.
Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.
Do not let pain make you hate.
Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.
Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree,
you still believe it to be a beautiful place.
- Kurt Vonnegut
When people ask me if I'm a pessimist or an optimist, I always hesitate. Frankly, I don't identify with either label. I like to say that more than focusing on either positives or negatives, I aim for something I call emotional honesty. I very much value being aware of life in all its nuances, both happy and sad, good and bad, beautiful and frightening. I don't think of myself as an optimist because I feel like being cheerful about everything all the time is avoiding the reality of all the pain and suffering that exists in the world. In the same way, though, I can't be a pessimist, because if I am paying any attention at all, the world is also ridiculously chock full of beauty and joy. Ignoring either side of the spectrum would be like going half-blind. I'm not into that option.
At the end of the day, though, if someone put a gun to my head and required me to choose either pessimism or optimism as my personal philosophy (a freak occurrence which I am not expecting, but you never know), I would have to side with optimism. This is because, in my heart, I truly believe that the good of life outweighs the bad, that good is the dominant force in the world, and evil's attempts to corrupt that good will ultimately fail. So even at ground zero, with thousands of innocent people reduced to ashes, I see the beauty of life outweighing the ugliness. I see in those ashes a heartbreaking reality, but also an undeniable truth that these beautiful people did exist, and each one of their lives was an epic story all its own, and none of them were necessary, none of them even had to be born. But they were born, they were here among us, and their presence on this planet made infinite amounts of difference to all of us, whether we know it or not. And the glory of those lives, although cut tragically short, vastly outshines the ugliness of death that tried to extinguish their power.
I don't like the label, but in the last analysis, maybe I am an optimist. Because, in spite of all the pain, all the bitterness, all the world's clamoring attempts to convince me otherwise... I still believe it to be a beautiful place. Life, light, and love will triumph; in fact, they already have.
I think I'd call myself an optimist as well, if I had to.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful truth? Death isn't ugly. You've got it backwards, girl. Death is another kind of terrible beauty. It's life that's ugly. Life is about the worst of monsters who might be able to sometimes do beautiful things. Death? Don't sweat it. I've been, and I'll tell you now: it's not so bad.
ReplyDelete-C
I think we are actually saying the same thing. What's backwards here may be our definition of terms.
ReplyDeleteLife can certainly be ugly, in its monotony, its loneliness, its random cruelty. These ugly things in life, however, I happen to attribute to Death with a capital D, you could say; meaning, the destructive forces I believe are at work in the world, eating away at not only our bodies (in the form of disease, injury, etc.), but also at our psyches (via negative emotions, broken relationships, etc.). So I believe what you are calling "life," I am calling "death."
Death can also be beautiful, in that it ultimately brings us into contact with what matters most. However, it is not so much death itself that inspires us. Death in and of itself is, often very literally, not pretty. (Think roadkill.) It's not the death part of death that is beautiful, but rather the life part of death: seen positively, death may represent rest, healing, heaven, or at the very least the chance to face the things that really matter and cherish what we love. All of this has to with life, love, and hope, if you think about it. It has to do with the story going on in some way (life), not ending in a squish of blood on the road (death).
So all these beautiful things, although related to death, I still place under the heading of "life."