July 22, 2004

• Looking on the Bright Side
  
  Mama always told me to look on the bright side.  She didn’t always
  follow her own advice, but whenever as a child I was gloomily depressed
  about some loss or injustice, or obsessed with the imperfections I
  perceived everywhere, she’d tell me to look on the bright side. 
  She insisted that there is always a bright side in every situation.

  I thought she was simpleminded.  True, she probably wouldn’t have
  scored as high on an IQ test as my father or I could, but she had the
  capacity to know wise truth when she heard it, and in her time she had
  been taught, just as she taught me, to look on the bright side. 
  Viewed from a psychological perspective, optimism makes sense. 
  Pessimists set themselves up for disappointment and failure by
  expecting it.  Why not set oneself up for pleasant surprises by
  going out of the way to look for them?  Particularly for
  perfectionistic, obsessive-compulsive people such as myself, prone to
  notice any little thing that’s out of whack and obsess over it, 
  the mere effort of finding a “bright side” can be a healthy mental
  exercise.

  Mama’s “bright side” philosophy was, I later learned, fairly advanced metaphysics.  Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God, wrote a parable for children, The Little Soul and the Sun. 
  In it he tells the story of a soul fixated on darkness until God points
  out that it’s standing in the light, obsessing on its shadow.  I
  oversimplify, but it really is a simple concept.  Light penetrates
  even into deep caves and tunnels.  Darkness is relative, and our
  perception of it hinges upon relativistic principles.  Shadows are
  an artifact of light.  Darkness is only the relative absence of
  light, just as in physics there is no such thing as “cold”:  it’s
  just a relative absence of heat.  Our senses allow us to choose to
  move toward light and warmth, or away from them.

  Yesterday when I told Doug I’d found the bright side to the looting and
  vandalism at our old home, I got an incredulous look from him. 
  When I explained, his expression turned to comprehension and amused
  pleasure.  I found, strewn around in the intruders’ wake, some
  things I’d forgotten I had and some other things I knew I had somewhere, but had forgotten where I stored them. 

  Now, I can turn my head and see on the windowsill my Franciscan Ware
  Coronado Coral Swirl coffee server (looked it up on eBay and identified
  the pattern). Nearby is a cheery yellow ceramic hippopotamus planter
  I’d always loved because seeing it makes me smile, which I packed away
  when I baby-proofed our house when the kid was little.  For a
  while back then I missed some of my fragile tschotchkies, and then I
  forgot they existed.  Now they are back in my life and in my view,
  thanks to the vandals.

  Thanks to Doug taking a longer than usual route on his dog walk and
  finding the mess, I was also able to retrieve my baby book and the
  guestbook from my father’s funeral before they were ruined by the
  weather.  In the same box with them, I found my slide rule,
  t-square, curve templates, and other drafting tools.  An
  assortment of big flat objects in a big flat box–I had no idea where
  any of that stuff was.  Blessings in disguise are blessings
  nonetheless.

  Today when I sat down here to start work on reconstructing the ME/CFIDS
  blog I lost earlier this week when my browser crashed, I found another
  blessing in disguise.  I started a fresh web search for data and
  links to include, and found resources I hadn’t found before.  I
  saved text and URLs in a notepad file and will go back and digest the
  new data before I start writing that CFS-101 blog again.  It’s
  going to be better this time around.  Being the bastard child of
  Pollyanna and Candide ain’t bad at all.
  

  • 3:24 pm
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