Here’s a joke I recently reread:
The optimistic kid and the pessimistic kid get Christmas presents.
The pessimistic child gets an electric train and the optimistic child gets… a dung heap!
The two meet and the optimistic child asks the pessimistic child:
What did you get for Christmas?
Pessimist: Eh, an electric train. But it’s no big deal, it’ll break down, it’s too big, I don’t know where to put it, it gets in the way around the house, it’s stupid, a joke. What about you? What did you get?
The optimist: I got a pony… but I can’t find it, I don’t know where it’s hidden!
The joke made me think of what often happens to many people: they only see the empty side of the glass, they look for something negative everywhere. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try to tell them, show that there are no objective reasons for them to think so negatively, you fail to bring them around. A path on which they can look at themselves more objectively and appreciate that in every endeavour, in every event there are good and bad, that in every glass there is a full and an empty part and, why not, it is to be appreciated that there is a glass.
Perhaps, from time to time, we all have moments when we seem to see more through a negative lens. There are those times in life, it’s true. But it’s important then to be open to what those around us are telling us, to hear when they offer other perspectives and to take them into account. This means cultivating our ability to step out of the eternal valley of complaint, to rise above it as if we were in a helicopter, and to shift our vantage point. From there, from the helicopter, the valley of complaint will seem too crowded, suffocating, dark, limiting. Who knows, maybe from above we’ll discover that beyond the valley there are other landforms, that there is sun on our street.