Keeping It Real

So, are you a 'glass half full' or 'glass half empty' kind of person?

That old cliché attempts to classify people into one of two camps, the half full glasses of the optimists or the half empty vessels of the pessimists. But what if you are neither? Too often we seek to oversimplify that which is deeply complicated, but conversely, we need a measure of simplicity in order to understand and make sense of the otherwise complex nature of things.

What we are talking about here is fundamental to how we view ourselves and our place in the world, and also how we view others around us. By extension, the optimist versus pessimist debate is another example of 'black and white' thinking. We probably all know people who would call themselves optimists. We may even concur that they do indeed generally possess a positive worldview and seem to look for the best in any given situation. Pessimists are far less likely to identify themselves as such, but I can almost guarantee you can think of someone you know who you might be tempted to label as negative in their outlook. Someone who often fails to see the good in things, and for whom there appears to be no light at the end of the tunnel.

My contention is that you cannot realistically divide people into one of these two 'black and white' camps without ignoring the shades of grey in between. Thankfully I am not alone in my musings. Among other insights, a random google search brought me to this page. There are some interesting variations on the theme here:

• Kate Brown - "We need to quit arguing about whether the glass is half full or half empty - and instead acknowledge that there's not quite enough water to go round."
• Scott Stossel - "There are lots of things, including changing the kind of inner dialog, that can mitigate anxiety. And yes, there are people who have the glass half full and glass half empty, and I'm afraid the glass is going to break and I'll cut myself on the shards."
• Brad Thor - "If we talk about the glass being half empty or half full, I want to know what does the glass look like from underneath the table?"

Sometimes I can relate to the optimists, with their half filled glasses, but unfortunately I have found that rose-coloured spectacles simply do not suit me. Sometimes I sympathise with the pessimists point of view. Whether due to a string of disappointments in life, or one big letdown, they have chosen to be negative. There's a weird kind of comfort in that. For a while. Ultimately though, and in spite of misery loving company so much, I have neither found that there is anything to gain from negativity, nor do I get along in the long term with those whose glasses are half empty.

If we have a fixed view of ourselves and our place in the world, and indeed of others and their place, aren't we basically stuck? The world changes every single day, sometimes more than once in a twenty-four hour period. There is good, and bad, and everything in between, going on all the time. If we choose to fix our minds into a rigid way of viewing our lives and the people in it, surely we are engaging in a destructive act of self-sabotage? Our flexibility and propensity to handle change, our ability to adjust according to our needs and the needs of others, our capacity for revising our thinking when we are in the wrong, our means of attaining and maintaining good judgment, our potential to challenge ourselves, all these skills and more effectively become shut down when we get stuck.

So, at this point in life, if forced to define myself in simplistic terms, I am a realist. The glass is neither half full nor half empty. It's just a glass. I hadn't really bothered to examine this further until recently, but during my latest reading I did find a couple of images that stood out for me..

You see, it's not all good being a realist. Life has taught me that one of the greatest skills you can possess is dedication to reality, at all costs. I am always trying to live up to this, but it has a big downside. The reality of the taxing and difficult situations the world presents us with can often be bleak, unpalatable and potentially very depressing. It is easier to forgo the effort and discomfort, and more often than not, do the hard work and accept the pain it takes to overcome something personally difficult, or to assimilate some bad news, or to accept something we find patently horrible, purely for the sake of avoiding the difficulty of dealing with it. But each and every time we avoid this legitimate and necessary suffering, no matter how seemingly insignificant we might deduce it to be, we increase our inherent ignorance, expand our prejudices and faulty presumptions, further close our minds and hearts, and essentially magnify the power of natural entropy that lies within us.

When an optimist is faced with one such situation they will inevitably find solace in some throwaway comment or thought, "well, such is life." This is all well and good, as long as the baby doesn't drown in the sewer as it gets flushed away with the bathwater, which happens all too often. 'Blind optimism' is an occupational hazard when your glass is always half full. In exactly the same way, the pessimist will be so busy with their conviction that "life's a bitch and then you die", they'll fail to notice that not everyone is a bitch. When they reach the light at the end of the particular tunnel they are busy travelling down, their response is simply, "great, now I'm blinded by that fucking light."

Never one to rest on my laurels, comfort is something that is regularly extremely hard for me to find. That's fine. I choose to be a realist, and all that comes with it. I choose to be fully conscious of all shades of life, the good, the bad and the ugly. I choose to see the world and the people in it through a prism of self-awareness and empathy. To me, these are both qualities that require constant learning and practice. No one has them in spades. Sure, some people have a greater or lesser propensity for them, but if one practices self-awareness daily, using the many tools available to learn from books and on websites, even totally lost souls can eventually establish these healthy checks and balances on their thinking. Likewise with empathy, if we choose to open up to the feelings and suffering of others, in all it's depths, our hearts can grow less cold and we can enable a much healthier mindset, in which the seeds of positive change might grow.

So that's where I'm at. It's a matter of perspective, I guess. My preference for science and reason probably drew me to the second image, and to conclude, for now, that my glass is completely full.

Copyright ©2018 Richard C. Greenlow. All rights reserved.