July 22, 2008
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What can a person do to be more optimistic in life?
Choose to be optimistic. Choose to look and think about things differently. Control the inner voice and tell it to say something different when it says something negative. There’s no other way. One has to want to be optimistic.
I have always hoped for the best, but experience has taught me to expect the worst from people and situations. One of my favorite writers put it this way about people in general: “they are ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, anxious to flee danger, and covetous of gain. So long as you prolong their advantage they are all yours, as I said before, and will offer you their blood, their goods, their lives and their children when the need for these is remote. When the need arises, however, they will turn against you.”
I found this to be true so I choose to think cautiously. Still it’s hard to force myself to think optimistcally when necessary, especially around friends and bretheren in Christ. Sometimes it bothers me to think about how naive they are to the evil taint that lurks in most people’s hearts.
Teaching of course only adds to the notion that most people are as my favorite author describes. I find it amusing, at times, to observe some pompous, dimwitted, new teacher full of altruistic expectations to save the world be eaten alive by those half-feral creatures squashed into her classroom. A pity really. Most of those animals should be strapped The Wheel of Pain rather than have to study (ironically to them a wheel of pain itself). But I digress.
Think positively. Don’t become a teacher unless you really want to.
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