"A pessimist only sees the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all- he's walking on them."
-Leonard Louis Levanson
Recently I heard myself voicing this to one of my peeps: "I don't seem to write my brother as much because my life is so good now that I have nothing to talk about." Just days before this word vomit, I ran into one of my good friends whom I hadn't seen or talked to in months. As we tried to figure out an explanation for this, he outted us: "It's because we haven't had any drama in our lives. Our lives have been so good that we haven't needed each other!" Wow. That dreadful realization made me ache. Why is it that only when my life is seemingly pitiful do I feel the need to proclaim it? Why don't I feel that need when my life is M. Poppins-esque in that it is "practically perfect in every way"? This proclivity of mine to vehemently declare my life's despondencies and merely whisper my life's little thrills is utterly disgraceful! Yesterday I drove right under a rainbow. A fully arched rainbow... In all my years I've never actually seen a WHOLE rainbow. I've only ever been able to witness HALF a rainbow. I couldn't help but compare this to my life and how, for so long, I've only been able to see "half the rainbow", hypothetically speaking, let alone anything at all through "the stormy clouds of my existence". How can one lead a happy, fulfilling life, if they fail to see the rainbows through the storm, or, I guess, after the storm?
Thank goodness for that rainbow (BTW i'm fully aware of how utterly... gay... all this talk about rainbows sounds, but just humor your girl...), because it was just what I needed to change my perspective and compel me toward a life of Optimism. I used to say that optimism was boring. More word vomit. Because... in all sincerity, I've always sort of been an optimist in a pessimist's clothing. This is making me sound like a contradictator, I know. First I say I'm Negative personified and then I promise that no, I really was a proponent of optimisticism. But, I say optimist in a pessimist's clothing because, even though it was effortless for me to complain, and bemoan, and condemn, and be all estrogenical all the time... Sometimes, deep down, I still had this little flicker of hope that things were going to be just fine. So it is true what they say. Beauty is only skin deep because my ability to find the beauty in situations was always there, just buried deep down beneath the surface. That little flicker, try as it may, never really surfaced. But the fact that it flickered at all under such circumstances is kind of inspiring, right? Let that little deep seeded flicker of optimism surface, and it can change everything. Suddenly, everything is rosy, your Pepsi glass is always half full, there's no such thing as a cloud without a silver lining, no tunnel without a light at the end, and all that jazzy jazz.
I heretofore pledge that I will now not only broadcast all the marvelousness in my life, but search tenaciously for it when it seems to be on holiday. There's nothing like a rainbow to make you switch sides. Pa ha. Peace and Love.
