American author, political activist and lecturer, Helen Keller, had a childhood that would leave most people in permanent despair. Contracting meningitis at 18 months old and losing all sight and hearing, she didn’t even know that objects had names. As a toddler she had no means of communication and no connection to the world. Yet, at the age of 24, Keller had graduated from Radcliffe University as the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
What allowed Helen Keller to overcome such adversity and find success and happiness? Her 1903 essay entitled Optimism, gives us some insight:
“Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal that they have set on the horizon, how happy they would be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life—if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.”
Optimism allows us to find happiness right where we are. It is the ability both to find “good” in one’s current life and to believe that more good is on its way. An optimist knows that the Universe is on his or her side. An optimist feels the promise of a good life, even when things are not going so well.
Is this misguided? Should we show more regard for “reality?” Should we focus on the negative issues at hand so that we might navigate through them with more awareness?
In the Science of Mind we believe that what we focus on will increase. We believe that the predominant ideas in our consciousness will find corresponding outward signs. In short, we believe that our thinking produces our experience of the world.
Optimism, then, is like affirmative prayer. As we claim our inward happiness, outward manifestations of this happiness will become apparent. As we choose to see the “bright side,” things will begin to lighten up. Our optimism, as we accept it and have faith in it, will remake our world in its image.
But I think Helen Keller puts it best:
“Thus my optimism is grounded in two worlds, myself and what is about me. I demand that the world be good, and lo, it obeys. I proclaim the world good, and facts range themselves to prove my proclamation overwhelmingly true. To what is good I open the doors of my being, and jealously shut them against what is bad. Such is the force of this beautiful and willful conviction; it carries itself in the face of all opposition. I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be argued into hopelessness. Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.”