[::..Jazz An Analogy: Optimist Versus Pessimist..::]

Yesterday, I tried to force the whole issue into perspective. I poured myself half a glass of Coke. It was supposed to be a device to explore the depth of my personality right into the obscure recesses of my brain. It didn't work. The glass was neither half-full nor half-empty. By the time it got complicated, I drank all. Of course I care to find out, but it was hardly worth the bother.
It is not that I did not know how to decipher the differences. The answer is readily apparent. Our personalities - I hesitate to add our intelligence - are the products of our characters. The underlying emotions that motivated the differences between an optimist and a pessimist are fear and hope, which in turn support their own views of life. Pessimists often hope for their own good and tend to fear for the "better" that they could not have. Optimists share the same emotions too, but they function in a very different manner. Optimists hope - they hope long and they hope hard, and when there is fear, they only fear that if they don't hope, then what they desire won't materialize. Optimists believe in hope and joy. That if you wish hard enough for something, and put some beliefs into it - what can happen, will happen. They are always convinced that there's a silver lining in every cloud, and that when you stumble into the trench of life, a higher ground beckons somewhere (A pessimist will tell you that it's quite possible to start digging.). Never ever hope for help from a pessimist. Pessimists often have low self-esteem; they will tear you down instead of pulling you up.
I had a friend once before who actually made me more of an optimist because she herself was so incredibly pessimistic. She had a cynical quip for every situation, a way to depress everyone around her, and a complete knack for finding the bad in everything that was good. It wasn't at all that she didn't care about other people, or that she thought she was better than them, but she'd been intimately living with that crushing loss of hope so often in her life that she misplaced her belief in her own "purple patch." Being around me drove her nuts. No matter how the ground beneath me shook, I kept a pretty good balance between hope and reality. Hence I felt that I needed to be a counter to her cynicism. We were like little shoulder angels with our friends; one pointing out the possibility of failure while the other extorted the possibility of success (I am the latter of course).
I am well aware that there are differing viewpoints on how to get what you want out of life. Pessimists and optimists approach life from very different ideals, but both are motivated by the same emotions of hope and fear; and these emotions are absolutely essential to all human beings but are even more important to optimists and pessimists.
This is my own personal finding about the making of optimists and pessimists. I believe it provides an answer provisional and incomplete, to the question: how do they come to be? For all the wisdom that it may imparts, you will find, here and there, words whose meaning are clear enough. But some of the syntax goes beyond a half-full or half-empty glass of water, it is vastly more complex, more subtle and nuance, than that your mind can process. Here are some of the examples that can best illustrate all the differences between an optimist and a pessimist. So Catch Me If You Can...
1 - If you choose to believe that "half a loaf is better than none", you are a pessimist. I would say that "ONE LOAF IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN HALF." - because I am an optimist.
2 - I am happily married to HOPE - I am an optimist. And then I fell in love and married CHANCE - I am an opportunist. If by choice I married CHANCE without securing HOPE, I would be a bigamist. But with the CHANCE that I took and the HOPE that I have, we all live happily ever after - I am a PERFECTIONIST.
3 - Someone you love was diagnosed with a hole in her heart. You see nothing of your future but a broken dream - you are a pessimist. I wouldn't hesitate to put another seventeen holes in her heart just so that you could have an eighteen holes golf course in your household - because I am an optimist.
4 - You believe in reincarnation because you think like monkey - you are a pessimist. And then you disintegrated yourself from all your friends and made an ally with a family that you know not - you are an optimist. You played your role with mischief in mind by fanning the flame of hatred - you are a protagonist. And when you try to articulate all of your religious virtues as if the TALEBAN is in town - you are an extremist. And you still think like monkey - you are a "Gorilla In The Mist."
5 - You have two horses in your stable with a future to breed - you are an optimist. But when they produce you no offspring, you traded the two horses in your stable for some donkeys in your life - you are a pessimist. And you also want to be the jackass in your household - you are an optimist. Only to realize later that the two horses that you traded for those donkeys are both male - you are STUPID.
6 - Suddenly you are suffocating because the world is not big enough for the two of us - you are a pessimist. And then you tried to fix the world with your fractured vocabulary - you are an optimist. Through an eye of a needle, the whole world is your big problems; and the world according to your eyes is all about your virtues and none of your shortcomings - you need an optometrist.
7 - Your bank account has zero balance and you think that the world is crashing on you - you are a pessimist. Then you took a bank loan - you are an optimist. When the bank chased you for repayment, you took out a second bank loan to service the first loan - you are definitely an optimist. Busted by the mounting debts, you secured a third loan to cover the second loan - you are an ECONOMIST.
To learn from these alone is to run the risk of an error. As the vocabulary and grammatical rules of human behavior diverge from one another in ways large and small, so too are my analogies. Having said that, do not attempt to remove your brain. This is not an instructional manual for making human. I think I have said this once before "Nobody can change a pig into a butterfly. If you're a pig, you're a pig - and that's that."
OOPS!! Before I forget...
8 - You had a marital miscarriage and suddenly no man is good enough for you - you are a pessimist. A decrepit soul, you are happy though - you are an optimist. Through your own looking glass, you are you own beautiful people - you are a narcissist. Only to realize that you do not have a bird in hand nor two in your bush - you are an OLD MAID.
All Work and No Play Will Make Jazz A Dull Boy - 4:10:00 AM