“Optimism isn’t a delusion. It’s a way of life” – Gary Vaynerchuk.
Vaynerchuk is an entrepreneur, and although our personalities differ, which affects our viewpoints toward certain things, particularly meditation, I find myself agreeing with him quite often – especially when it comes to happiness, kindness, and optimism.
“Oftentimes, optimism is the ultimate form of realism” is what I always say; it is complementary to Vaynerchuk’s quote. Too often we view being optimistic as a form of naivety, or as a form of denial when the truth is undesirable. Sometimes this is the case. There’s a time to realize the world isn’t sunshine and rainbows. There’s a time to embrace your own misfortune.
But I find that these times are—or at least should be—a minority with regard to what we experience over the course of our lifetime. And I feel that, for so many people, that’s reversed.
It’s an incredible feeling when optimism justly overcomes negativity, and you realize that you’re not kidding yourself for thinking positive. You realize that you were kidding yourself when you were being negative.
But in the end it feels as if you’ve discovered a new color which was under your nose all along, and you wonder how you could have been so clouded and so blind before … it’s not tricking yourself into being happy, because that’s a very real thing involving denying your problems, and it’s very unhealthy.
What I’m talking about is, on a biological level, the brain’s ability to release serotonin while deploying a useful snowball effect. That is, once you are able to chip away just a small bit of negativity, it is more likely that the rest of it will crumble away. And under this negativity shell is not some distorted, childish view. That’s not optimism. Optimism is *real.* Under the shell of negativity is *reality.* Optimism isn’t necessarily blind faith as we make it out to be.
Quite often, optimism is in fact very logical; negativity is the only thing preventing us from working with that logic.
