It had been some time since I gave this a thought, but the lecturer in me was revived by my 7 year old cousin, who eagerly asked me about optimism. Being the optimist I thought myself to be, I gave him quite a lecture on what optimism was and why he should be an optimist, quoting the half filled glass example. I told him that viewing the glass as half full was a sign of optimism when he asked me, “But doesn’t saying ‘half full’ imply that the glass is half empty?”
So true this was that I spent half of the day thinking about it. Can someone be an optimist without indulging into pessimism as well? Maybe sometimes. But not always. Optimism and pessimism, I realized were two sides of the same coin. To view only one side and ignore the other was not acknowledging the whole truth.
So what should one do? Can one be an optimist and pessimist at the same time? Of course, we can! Though optimism and pessimism may seem to be opposites, they are not. We should be optimists in believing that things will work out well, but also share the pessimist’s viewpoint of what could possibly go wrong. One could say that what we should have is optimism of will and pessimism of intellect. Optimism will cause us to act and believe that the action will be beneficial, and pessimism will enable us to be prepared for any adversity that we might have to endure. Together, optimism and pessimism have the capacity to make us hope, and as we all know, hope is a good thing.
And by the way, here’s an entirely different viewpoint on the half filled glass example. I found this on the web, (I can’t remember where), but this is too good to be left out. Consider the half filled glass again. The person who declares the glass to be half full (the optimist) has an empty glass in mind when he sees the glass and finds it to be more than his expectations. On the other hand, the person who declares the glass to be half empty (the pessimist) obviously had expected a full glass and sees that the glass is less than what he had expected. Thus the optimist had actually been expecting the worst case and was pleasantly surprised to see that the glass was half full. The pessimist had been expecting an ideal condition (that of a completely filled glass) and was sorely disappointed to see the half empty glass. Thus the optimist was a cynic and the pessimist was an idealist. This paradigm is almost the polar opposite of the original paradigm and thus makes the debate on the half filled glass more interesting.
Mindful 