COLUMN: Optimism at the Top of the Year

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By Tobin Barnes
Tis the season of optimism.

After all, the days are getting longer—minutely so, but longer nonetheless. The painful process of gradually lightening skies keeps our heads up, tentatively looking forward to spring.

There’s progress in the lengthening day, even if it’s barely detectable amidst the overwhelming darkness, kind of like the difference between ten below zero and nine below zero. Nine below is scientifically warmer, certainly, but who can tell the difference?

Well, an optimist can. It’s a glass that’s a little fuller.

And optimism is absolutely essential for survival this time of the year.

Admit it or not, optimism is etched in our DNA. We wouldn’t have evolved this far otherwise. The caveman would have thrown down his crude mallet and willingly sacrificed himself to the sabertooth tiger without it, would have tried to step into every random stampede of wooly mammoths just to get it over with.

Without the optimism that cave life wasn’t as bad as it seemed and maybe could even get a little better, sabertooths, not us, would now dominate the landscape, this very moment scanning the horizon for another species of disgruntled, mopey prey like the sullen humans he consumed so long ago.

Take my old man for instance. He was a begrudging optimist despite the fact that his joys seemed to come from seeing his predicted turns for the worse pan out. Way too often, he practiced pessimism like a devout monk. “The writing’s on the wall,” was his mantra of impending doom.

Like many children of the Depression, any glimmer of prosperity made him nervous. Unfortunately, I think it was his absolute, all-encompassing childhood poverty and the yoke of defeated parents that seemed to have permanently grayed his outlook.

I’ve never really blamed him for that hardened exterior, knowing what I know of his youth. But I pride myself in not generationally succumbing to such a bleak perspective.

He always seemed to believe that any uptick just couldn’t last.

Yup, “We’re going to hell in a hand basket,” he’d predict. (Despite the gloominess of our supposed fate, I always found that to be a picturesque metaphor. Would we have to get smaller or would the hand basket have to get bigger?)

Even Christmas inspired little merriment in him unless it were his opportunities to say, “Bah, humbug!” with his own practiced brand of twisted glee.

His parsimony seemed to rub off on me sometimes. As a little kid, I naively gave him two packs of cigarettes from his own carton, wrapped and bowed in the holiday spirit. (He was a three-pack-a-day man. I’m lucky to still be alive, growing up in that miasma of carcinogens.)

But when he unwrapped his package of self-owned smokes, a smile and small laugh creased his face. Maybe he was proud to have raised a chintzy son.

I tried giving him a better present another year, but, man, he could suck the fun out of giving a Christmas gift like Grinch himself: “Take it back,” he grumpily responded. So that’s what I did with the Lawrence Welk album I had given him (Could it have been my gift choices?)

After that, I gave up trying to give him anything, and that seemed to make him happier—albeit that’s an exceedingly relative description.

But even my curmudgeon of a dad—as pessimistic and cynical as he could be—even he clung to optimism this time of the year in the face of three more months of winter. “The days are getting longer,” he’d frequently say, no matter what kind of funk of the moment was eating at him.

And when the last snow was melting down to the last surviving patches of stubborn ice, he’d be out there with an ice chopper to break it up into more easily meltable bits to send it on its way just a little bit quicker, totally optimistic that that was the last he’d see of it for months and months. Whether it was or wasn’t.

Of course, in his world, spring always brought its problems, too.