Looking for the pony!

The late Ronald Reagen loved a story about twin brothers, one an optimist and the other a painful pessimist. With his winsome way, Reagen tells how the boys’ father puts them in their bedrooms, the pessimist with a room full of brand-new toys and the optimistic son with a room full of horse manure. After a while the father checks in on his boys. He finds the pessimist sitting on the floor surrounded by unopened toys crying: “If I play with them, I’m afraid I’ll break something.” To the father’s surprise he finds the optimistic boy with a shovel in hand, hard at work. Then the punchline, “With all this horse manure, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere.”

Maybe a great life lesson: better to be optimistic, glass half full, if life gives you lemons make lemonade. But, like most pithy stories the appearance of a simplistic message may hide a more poignant and complex truth. Because we desire ease of understanding and prefer simple messaging we latch onto the superficial meaning: “be happy!” “Look at the bright side.” “While you think you’ve been buried, you’ve actually been planted.” “You get to choose!” But, what if this bent for simplicity actually causes a kind of hidden harm to the psyche or soul?

More than brothers in a parable about optimism, what if the twins in the story represent the extreme of voices residing in all of us? Who among us never has doubts or fears or reticence? We all do. If we’re honest with ourselves, all of us have inner conversations about challenges in life. Optimism and pessimism reflect oversimplifications of two voices in the mental talks we have with ourselves. It would be great if we could choose one and completely blot out the other. It’s tempting to think we can. Just not human. Granted, optimism as a choice has value; but dismissing the reality of the pessimistic voice leads to shame and self-deception: as if one could completely eliminate the negative, always in favor of the positive. If I buy the sham of that possibility, deep down I’ll know something must be wrong with me, since I can’t seem to do it (no matter how hard I try). Fear, doubt and caution (represented by the sad brother) fit within the full range of human emotions and to deny them is to deny an essential part of ourselves. To our detriment, we attempt to choose optimism and repress pessimism.

Let us call the first brother Fear and the second, Hope. Both serve important functions as we navigate the journey of life. Fear keeps the ship off the rocks; Hope keeps the bow pointed toward our own versions of true north. Without Fear the ship will surely sink (though we may be smiling while it does). Without hope, the ship never leaves the harbor.

The late Czech poet, dissident and president, Vaclav Havel once said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Too often we give away our right and responsibility to think critically about the narratives we hear and the ones we repeat. Such abdication leads to poor mental health of individuals and the body politic and usually serves an agenda beyond the scope of awareness (unless we choose to do the work of awareness). That agenda often involves unconsciously yielding to others a certain power to avoid their own discomfort (even if that discomfort might provide growth). In President Reagen’s tale the father has discomfort over the fears of the first son and delight in the second. Everybody votes for the second son. But what if, in our desire to live joy-filled lives, both have voices of meaning and wisdom.

In the quest for better mental/emotional health, our challenge is to make room for both without being ruled by either.