If Wishes Came True

I’ve got a friend who’s rather pessimistic about change or anything non-conforming. Every time I tried to confide in him in the hope of getting some form of emotional support for a new endeavour in my life, he’d never fail to off-load his list of negative consequences to me. I’d usually either spend half the time of our meeting defending my decision for this change or simply go home feeling disheartened. A mutual friend of ours concurred to this too and she now knows better than to approach him if she only needed to hear comforting words.

Oh, I’m not saying he’s a bad person. We all know he’s doing this out of concern. He once even told me, after I made a complaint, that if he didn’t regard me as his friend, he wouldn’t be bothered to caution me about the possible setbacks. I wish I could tell you some of the so-called ‘possible’ negative consequences he managed to contrive that got me into stitches. Now before you start thinking that I’m trying to blog-bash my friend here, hold your horses.

I’m sure many of us have been guilty of being pessimistic towards a friend before, who only wanted our encouragement at that time. I remembered having negative thoughts rushing through my brain immediately when a friend told me she’s about to marry a guy whom she had known for only 6 months. I gave her a diabetically sugar-coated version of urging her to consider again.

Should we really blame ourselves for being negative and pessimistic about things which are too good to be true? Of course our government wasn’t giving us money simply because we’ve really contributed to the success of our economy, some say. Nothing catches our attention more these days than cover stories in magazines like ‘I Paid My Husband to Have Sex with Me’ or ‘How I Juggled My Affairs with 10 Filipina Maids Without the Knowledge of My Wife?’

Pessimism is the emotional fashion of today. If you prefer to stay at home, you have no life. If you choose not to have children, you must be barren. The simple joys of life apparently don’t seem all that glamourous anymore. Coping.org (http://www.coping.org/anger/pessimis.htm), a Public Service of James J. Messina, Ph.D. & Constance M. Messina, Ph.D., will be able to let you know if you’re on the path to being Mr/Ms Pessimist of the Year.

The rise of pessimism is also leading to the diminishing existence of hope. In a world where we’re constantly being challenged for walking a path less traveled, hope can sometimes be that driving force to keep ourselves going. Then why aren’t we as hopeful as we should be?

Now what if I told you that all human beings are born evil? So in other words, the almighty being many of us believe to be God is actually what Christians would call, The Devil. Good was only introduced by crazy people who basically created religion. This would thus easily explain why for every single act of kindness in this world, there would be at least three acts stemmed from evil. So if we contracted a terminal illness or lost our life savings by mid-life, there is absolutely no hope for us because we were born only to acquire self-glorification and self-gratification. We were never to hope for the best, or anything for that matter. How does it feel then to know that the idea of hope was created by The Devil to toy with our emotions for his sheer amusement?

Then what about those many inspirational accounts of people who survived The Devil’s grasps to emerge victorious like John F. Nash (a mathematician struck with paranoid schizophrenia at the age of 29 in 1958, was practically incapacitated for decades following that, but later won a Nobel prize in 1994 for his work); or Harland Sanders (founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken who tried selling his original recipe to restaurants and got rejected over 3,000 times before his first sale and started franchising around the US when he was 60 years old); or Lance Armstrong (a cyclist diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer who escaped death and later won 7 consecutive Tour de France)? I guess these must have been mere errors overlooked by The Devil and have got nothing to do with the power of the human spirit, which somehow leads us to hopefulness?

‘Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.’ - Memoirs of a Geisha