Vedanta - Choose: Mud or the Stars?

NITI PAUL MEHTA





Optimism is not a deep, complicated philosophy or a school of thought. It is more a matter of our general attitude to life.We find that some people always look at the bright side of things while there are some others who always see the bad, dark side of things. To an optimist, every cloud has a silver lining. A pessimist, on the other hand, misses the silver lining and sees only the cloud.Frederick Langbridge sums it up, “Two men look out through the same bars: one sees the mud, and one the stars“.One Sunday morning, when William Dean Howells and Mark Twain came out of the church, it started raining heavily . “Do you think it will stop?“ asked Howells. “It al ways has,“ re plied Twain.
An optimist hopes for the best. Optimi sm nurtures two things most: hope and cheerfulness.Alexander regarded hope as the greatest possession of mankind. He held that if you destroy `hope', you destroy `future'. Hope strengthens will to survive calamities, so that we never give way to despair.
It helps us count our blessings, and hope persistently goads us to `go on'. It is rightly said that “an optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; a pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity“.
An optimist reacts to situations differently . He thinks and acts in a positive manner. Urdu poet Asar Lakhnavi wrote, when I do not succeed in achieving my aim, I think of attaining it through a different approach, and so I try again.