Even Optimists
Die, Eventually
by Janet Eve
Josselyn
Some people
perpetually look on the bright side of things.
Optimists, you might call them. I’d call
them idiots who should be kept in the attic. In
this economy, it is far too easy to dwell on the
dark side of things, imagining every possible
scenario where things could go awry. And when not
all of those deaths and dismemberments come to
pass, we can all feel uplifted.
I can feel
genuine joy when I finish trimming the bushes
with my electric bush trimmer and I still have
all my fingers. But such delight is foreign to
the optimists of the world who expect everything
to be fine all of the time. Those people
erroneously assume, for no reason, that they will
be able walk the aisles of the supermarket
without the snow load on the roof exceeding the
weight-bearing capacity of the steel trusses that
were spaced too far apart as a cost saving device.
Those
optomists feel no special joy when they walk
under a tree and a particularly large and heavy
branch does not crash down impaling them through
the liver. These would be the same people who
clean their ears with Q-tips without so much as a
thought about ramming the Q-tip in a little too
far and penetrating their brain.
I never chose
to go through life thinking this way, and in fact,
I have tried to change my perspective from time
to time. I once made a conscious effort not to
visualize what would happen if I didn’t run
fast enough on the treadmill. I tried to focus
very hard on the TV and whether two movie stars
had secretly married which caused me to forget
about running at all. I flew off the back of the
treadmill and onto the floor on my fanny. If I
had allowed myself to consider the consequences
in advance, I would have imagined something
similar, substituting a particularly large and
sharp piece of exercise equipment in place of the
floor. But that thought would have kept me
running.
So I guess it
all comes down to whether you think that
envisioning the worst might afford you the
opportunity to do something to prevent it from
happening or whether you’d rather blissfully
assume that everything will be fine as you talk
on your cell phone while crossing a busy street
as a fire truck races towards you. I think
you’d be better off imagining the worst and
staying on the curb. Or maybe under your bed,
safe in your home . . . although the bed frame
could give way and all 300 pounds of the king-sized
mattress would pin you to the floor where no one
would find you until the cleaning lady came and
you’d be dead by then.
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