“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”
— Roberto Rossellini
There is a vast difference between pessimism and realism. Imagine you live the life of the goldfish, who purportedly doesn’t remember from one trip around the tank to the next. This may be happiness for the fish, a blissful oblivion, but think of what’s comparable in human existence—a vegetative state, or dementia. Hardly bliss. So then you run to the opposite end of the scale—hyperawareness. In our culture we must have a twenty-four-hour live news feed of the latest disaster, and rather than informing us or stimulating us, it depresses us and anesthetizes us. We know intuitively that this is not the knowledge and understanding we seek, but it fills our brains just as empty calories fill our stomachs. How can we know more deeply? We can acknowledge and seek to understand the bad in life, the evil in the world, as a means to an end—of change, of understanding, of peace. You cannot combat an evil you refuse to acknowledge—and you cannot grow from a terrified paralysis.
Excerpted from: Half Full: Meditations on Hope, Optimism, and the Things That Matter (Conari Press).