It is clear that like the powers of the superheroes and villains of the comic book universe my family love so much, something like Twitter, for example, can be used for great good or great evil. Don’t walk home late at night through a dodgy area alone. For goodness’ sake, don’t get in the van with the strange man just because, as a general rule, you trust in the goodness of humanity.* Keep your bag firmly shut and safe, especially when you’re in a busy city. Having said all of that, I feel it’s important to point out that choosing to act like an optimist doesn’t mean being stupid or unrealistic. That’s an instinct we all have to fight, because, as this beautiful video (shared with me by a kind stranger on Twitter) says, ‘While we live, let us live.’ It means men and women can withstand even the worst of times, through suffering and even extreme vulnerability – the kind of vulnerabilities of illness and old age that our culture conditions us to be squeamish about, to wish we could shut away and not face. This revelation was completely ‘game changing’ for me it means that no one, however evil, and no circumstances, however bad, can ever take away my joy, my power and ability to impact things for the better. The same applies with choosing to act in joy. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.’ As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. I realised, then, that while you can’t choose to feel joy, you can choose to act as if you choose joy. To quote Lewis again, because he just gets it: ‘Do not waste time bothering whether you love your neighbor act as if you did. It made me so sad to think that I might waste these precious days, weeks, months, trapped inside my own grief, unable to reach out and make the most of the time we had left together. I realised I had started mourning pre-emptively before it was time. Lewis was writing about grief after the death of a loved one, and yet reading those words a few weeks ago when we had just had the news that dad was in the final stages of cancer, I had the uncanny feeling he was reading my mind. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.’Ĭ. I dread the moments when the house is empty. I find it hard to take in what anyone says… Yet I want the others to be about me. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. Lewis writes: ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. To someone in the depths of a dark situation, no matter how naturally optimistic they may consider themselves, hearing snappy mantras telling you that you can just change your mood if only you want it enough, grates like hell. (I prefer the phrase, from I Capture the Castle, ‘consciously naive’, myself, for reasons that will become clear later.) Recently, though, I’ve been challenged by the experiences of dad’s cancer and the hormonal ups and downs of sleep deprivation and having a new baby to rethink what all those inspirational quotes I usually love so much mean when they say things like ‘Choose Joy!’. I have always considered myself a ‘glasses half full’ kind of person, and have often been gently (and sometimes not so gently) mocked by people who consider themselves to be more of the ‘worldly-wise’ mould for being what they think of as naive. If we believe that these things are attributes, fixed, inflexible traits that are inherent to who we are, we can feel either trapped in cycles of negativity, or floored by the experience of pain and depression when it hits us unexpectedly. You might be more disposed to one or the other mindset, and life and circumstance might have taught you to be more one than the other, but while we are all very keen to label ourselves and others as either a cynic or a Pollyanna, a pessimist or an optimist, I think we have to be careful not to be limited by these labels. Similarly, I don’t think people are born with either cynical or trusting natures. I think the whole wonder of it is that you can live fearlessly in spite of fear as John Wayne put it, ‘Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.’ If it was just a quality you were either born with or not, there wouldn’t be anything very empowering about it. People often think that ‘fearlessness’ means not being afraid of anything, but I don’t think that’s true.
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