hi all,
this is a bit long. but i urge every1 to read this at your own
convenient time. these r truely deep and very profound words coming
from some1 who started off receiving a world full of only silence in
the beginning. please read this, and try to gain some motivation/
inspiration out of it. inspiration to, not only accept the things we
cant change, but to make the most of our situation.
hope u do find your share of positivity here. read on:
Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the
steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend
Decades before the dawn of the positive psychology movement and a
century before what neuroscience has taught us about the benefits of
optimism, Helen Keller the remarkable woman who grew up without
sight and hearing until, with the help of her teacher Annie Sullivan,
she learned to speak, read, write, and inhabit the life of the mind
with such grace and fierceness that made her one of historys most
inspired intellectual heroes penned a timeless treatise on optimism
as a philosophy of life. Simply titled Optimism (public library;
public domain), it was originally published in 1903 and written a
moment of pause here after Keller learned to write on a grooved
board over a sheet of paper, using the grooves and the end of her
index pencil to guide her writing.
She opens the first half of the book, Optimism Within, by reflecting
on the universal quest for happiness, that alluring and often elusive
art-science at the heart of all human aspiration:
Could we choose our environment, and were desire in human undertakings
synonymous with endowment, all men would, I suppose, be optimists.
Certainly most of us regard happiness as the proper end of all earthly
enterprise. The will to be happy animates alike the philosopher, the
prince and the chimney-sweep. No matter how dull, or how mean, or how
wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.
But Keller admonishes against the what-if mentality that pegs our
happiness on the attainment of material possession, which always
proves vacant, rather than on accessing a deeper sense of purpose:
Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and
material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have
set on the horizon, how happy they could be! Lacking this gift or that
circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so
measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a
corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my
deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so
thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, if, in short, I am
an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
Recounting her own miraculous blossoming from the inner captivity of a
deaf-mute to the intellectual height of a cultural luminary, she
brings exquisite earnestness to this rhetorical question:
Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. Once
I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. Now I
rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven.
Can anyone who escaped such captivity, who has felt the thrill and
glory of freedom, be a pessimist?
My early experience was thus a leap from bad to good. If I tried, I
could not check the momentum of my first leap out of the dark; to move
breast forward as a habit learned suddenly at that first moment of
release and rush into the light. With the first word I used
intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.
Still, Keller is careful to distinguish between intelligent and
reckless optimism:
Optimism that does not count the cost is like a house builded on sand.
A man must understand evil and be acquainted with sorrow before he can
write himself an optimist and expect others to believe that he has
reason for the faith that is in him.
Reflecting once again on her own experience, she argues that, much
like the habits of mind William James advocated for as the secret of
life, optimism is a choice:
I know what evil is. Once or twice I have wrestled with it, and for a
time felt its chilling touch on my life; so I speak with knowledge
when I say that evil is of no consequence, except as a sort of mental
gymnastic. For the very reason that I have come in contact with it, I
am more truly an optimist. I can say with conviction that the struggle
which evil necessitates is one of the greatest blessings. It makes us
strong, patient, helpful men and women. It lets us into the soul of
things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it
is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest
on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of
good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it
may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the
best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my
life. The world is sown with good; but unless I turn my glad thoughts
into practical living and till my own field, I cannot reap a kernel of
the good.
Keller explores the two anchors of optimism ones inner life and the
outer world and admonishes against the toxic nature of doubt:
I demand that the world be good, and lo, it obeys. I proclaim the
world good, and facts range themselves to prove my proclamation
overwhelmingly true. To what good I open the doors of my being, and
jealously shut them against what is bad. Such is the force of this
beautiful and willful conviction, it carries itself in the face of all
opposition. I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be
argued into hopelessness. Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of
timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the
large mind transcend.
Like Isabel Allende, who sees creativity as order to the chaos of
life, Keller riffs on Carlyle and argues for creative enterprise as a
source of optimism:
Work, production, brings life out of chaos, makes the individual a
world, an order; and order is optimism.
And yet she is sure to caution against the cult of productivity, a
reminder all the timelier today as we often squander presence in favor
of productivity, and uses Darwins famed daily routine to make her
point:
Darwin could work only half an hour at a time; yet in many diligent
half-hours he laid anew the foundations of philosophy. I long to
accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to
accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. It is my
service to think how I can best fulfill the demands that each day
makes upon me, and to rejoice that others can do what I cannot.
She sees optimism, like Italo Calvino did literature, as a collective
enterprise:
I love the good that others do; for their activity is an assurance
that whether I can help or not, the true and the good will stand sure.
Though her tone at times may appear to be overly religious on the
surface, Kellers skew is rather philosophical, demonstrating that,
not unlike science has a spiritual quality, optimism is a kind of
secular religion:
I trust, and nothing that happens disturbs my trust. I recognize the
beneficence of the power which we all worship as supreme Order,
Fate, the Great Spirit, Nature, God. I recognize this power in the sun
that makes all things grow and keeps life afoot. I make a friend of
this indefinable force, and straightway I feel glad, brave and ready
for any lot Heaven may decree for me. This is my religion of optimism.
[
]
Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm
belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote,
unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near
every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea and sky, but
also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts, the source and
centre of all minds, their only point of rest.
In the second half of the book, Optimism Without, she makes an
eloquent addition to these notable definitions of philosophy and
touches on the ancient quandary of whether what we perceive as
external reality might be an illusion:
Philosophy is the history of a deaf-blind person writ large. From the
talks of Socrates up through Plato, Berkeley and Kant, philosophy
records the efforts of human intelligence to be free of the clogging
material world and fly forth into a universe of pure idea. A
deaf-blind person ought to find special meaning in Platos Ideal
World. These things which you see and hear and touch are not the
reality of realities, but imperfect manifestations of the Idea, the
Principal, the Spiritual; the Idea is the truth, the rest is delusion.
Much like legendary filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky advised the young to
learn to enjoy their own company, Keller argues for philosophy as the
gateway to finding richness in life without leaving ones self an
art all the more important in the age of living alone. She writes:
My brethren who enjoy the fullest use of the senses are not aware of
any reality which may not equally well be in reach of my mind.
Philosophy gives to the mind the prerogative of seeing truth, and
bears us not a realm where I, who am blind, and not different from you
who see.
It seemed to me that philosophy had been written for my
special consolation, whereby I get even with some modern philosophers
who apparently think that I was intended as an experimental case for
their special instruction! But in a little measure my small voice of
individual experience does join in the declaration of philosophy that
the good is the only world, and that world is a world of spirit. It is
also a universe where order is All, where an unbroken logic holds the
parts together, where distance defines itself as non-existence, where
evil, as St. Augustine held, is delusion, and therefore is not. The
meaning of philosophy to me is not only its principles, but also in
the happy isolation of its great expounders. They were seldom of the
world, even when like Plato and Leibnitz they moved in its courts and
drawing rooms. To the tumult of life they were deaf, and they were
blind to its distraction and perplexing diversities. Sitting alone,
but not in darkness, they learned to find everything in themselves
In a sentiment Neil deGrasse Tyson would come to echo more than a
century later in his articulate case for why our smallness amidst the
cosmos should be a source of assurance rather than anxiety, Keller
observes:
Thus from the philosophy I learn that we see only shadows and know
only in part, and that all things change; but the mind, the
unconquerable mind, compasses all truth, embraces the universe as it
is, converts the shadows to realities and makes tumultuous changes
seem but moments in an eternal silence, or short lines in the infinite
theme of perfection, and the evil but a halt on the way to good.
Though with my hand I grasp only a small part of the universe, with my
spirit I see the whole, and in my thought I can compass the beneficent
laws by which it is governed. The confidence and trust which these
conceptions inspire teach me to rest safe in my life as in a fate, and
protect me from spectral doubts and fears.
Keller argues of America as a mecca of optimism. And yet, as
hearteningly patriotic as her case may be, a look at the present state
of the plight of marriage equality, the gaping wound of income
inequality, and the indignity of immigrants struggles (of whom I am
one) reveals how much further we have to go to live up to this
optimistic ideal:
It is true, America has devoted herself largely to the solution of
material problems breaking the fields, opening mines, irrigating the
deserts, spanning the continent with railroads; but she is doing these
things in a new way, by educating her people, by placing at the
service of every mans need every resource of human skill. She is
transmuting her industrial wealth into the education of her workmen,
so that unskilled people shall have no place in American life, so that
all men shall bring mind and soul to the control of matter. Her
children are not drudges and slaves. The Constitution has declared it,
and the spirit of our institutions has confirmed it. The best the land
can teach them they shall know. They shall learn that there is no
upper class in their country, and no lower, and they shall understand
how it is that God and His world are for everybody.
America might do all this, and still be selfish, still be a worshipper
of Mammon. But America is the home of charity as well as commerce.
Who shall measure the sympathy, skill and intelligence with which she
ministers to all who come to her, and lessens the ever-swelling tide
of poverty, misery and degradation which every year rolls against her
gates from all the nations? When I reflect on all these facts, I
cannot but think that, Tolstoi and other theorists to the contrary, it
is a splendid thing to be an American. In America the optimist finds
abundant reason for confidence in the present and hope for the future,
and this hope, this confidence, may well extend over all the great
nations of the earth.
Further on, she adds, It is significant that the foundation of that
law is optimistic and yet what more pessimistic a law than an
immigration policy based on the assumption that if left to their own
devices, more immigrants would do harm than would do good, what sadder
than a policy built on the belief that affording love the freedom of
equality would result in destruction rather than dignity?
Still, some of Kellers seemingly over-optimistic contentions have
been since confirmed by modern science for instance, the decline of
violence, which she rightly observes:
If we compare our own time with the past, we find in modern statistics
a solid foundation for a confident and buoyant world-optimism. Beneath
the doubt, the unrest, the materialism, which surround us still glows
and burns at the worlds best life a steadfast faith.
[
]
During the past fifty years crime has decreased. True, the records of
to-day contain a longer list of crime. But our statistics are more
complete and accurate than the statistics of times past. Besides,
there are many offenses on the list which half a century ago would not
have been thought of as crimes. This shows that the public conscience
is more sensitive than it ever was.
Our definition of crime has grown stricter,* our punishment of it more
lenient and intelligent. The old feeling of revenge has largely
disappeared. It is no longer an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
The criminal is treated as one who is diseased. He is confined not
merely for punishment, but because he is a menace to society. While he
is under restraint, he is treated with human care and disciplined so
that his mind shall be cured of its disease, and he shall be restored
to society able to do his part of its work.
* Though this may be mostly true on a theoretical level, practical
disgraces to democracy like the epidemic of rape in the military offer
a tragic counterpoint.
In reflecting on the relationship between education and the good life,
Keller argues for the broadening of education from an industrial model
of rote memorization to fostering scholars who can link the
unlinkable. Though this ideal, too, is a long way from reality today,
Kellers words shine as a timeless guiding light to aspire toward:
Education broadens to include all men, and deepens to teach all
truths. Scholars are no longer confined to Greek, Latin and
mathematics, but they also study science converts the dreams of the
poet, the theory of the mathematician and the fiction of the economist
into ships, hospitals and instruments that enable one skilled hand to
perform the work of a thousand. The student of to-day is not asked if
he has learned his grammar. Is he a mere grammar machine, a dry
catalogue of scientific facts, or has he acquired the qualities of
manliness? His supreme lesson is to grapple with great public
questions, to keep his mind hospitable to new idea and new views of
truth, to restore the finer ideals that are lost sight of in the
struggle for wealth and to promote justice between man and man. He
learns that there may be substitutes for human labor horse-power and
machinery and books; but there are no substitutes for common sense,
patience, integrity, courage.
In a sentiment philosopher Judith Butler would come to second in her
fantastic recent commencement address on the value of the humanities
as a tool of empathy, Keller argues:
The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and
died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of
courage the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and
their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principle of
community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men
think. No loss by flood and lightening, no destruction of cities and
temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many
noble lives and impulses as those which his tolerance has destroyed.
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light, Stanley
Kubrick memorably asserted, and its hard not to see in his words an
echo of Kellers legacy. She presages the kernel of Martin Seligmans
seminal concept of learned optimism and writes:
The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. It be true
that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it,
them it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy. One who
believes that the pain in the world outweighs the joy, and expresses
that unhappy conviction, only adds to the pain.
Life is a fair
field, and the right will prosper if we stand by our guns.
Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy,
all vanity and vexation of spirit.
If I regarded my life from the
point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in
vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does
not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be
satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and
despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be
happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.
In the final and most practical part of the book, The Practice of
Optimism, Keller urges:
Who shall dare let his incapacity for hope or goodness cast a shadow
upon the courage of those who bear their burdens as if they were
privileges? The optimist cannot fall back, cannot falter; for he knows
his neighbor will be hindered by his failure to keep in line. He will
therefore hold his place fearlessly and remember the duty of silence.
Sufficient unto each heart is its own sorrow. He will take the iron
claws of circumstance in his hand and use them as tools to break away
the obstacle that block his path. He will work as if upon him alone
depended the establishment of heaven and earth.
She once again return to the notion of optimism as a collective good
rather than merely an individual choice, even a national asset:
Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every
pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of
pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the
individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle
against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains
of joy in the world.
[
]
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done
without hope.
In an ever-timelier remark in our age of fear-mongering sensationalism
in the news a remark E. B. White would come to second decades later
in arguing that a writer should tend to lift people up, not lower
them down Keller points to the responsibility of the press in
upholding its share of this collective enterprise:
Our newspapers should remember this. The press is the pulpit of the
modern world, and on the preachers who fill it much depends. If the
protest of the press against unrighteous measures is to avail, then
for ninety nine days the word of the preacher should be buoyant and of
good cheer, so that on the hundredth day the voice of censure may be a
hundred times strong.
Keller ends on a note of inextinguishable faith in the human spirit
and timeless hope for the future of our world:
As I stand in the sunshine if a sincere and earnest optimism, my
imagination paints yet more glorious triumphs on the cloud-curtain of
the future. Out of the fierce struggle and turmoil of contending
systems and powers I see a brighter spiritual era slowly emerge an
era in which there shall be no England, no France, no Germany, no
America, no this people or that, but one family, the human race; one
law, peace; one need, harmony; one means, labor
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