by Travis Casey

Created on: February 17, 2007   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

"The wages of sin is death. The wages of death is taxes". Looks like were on a two time loser here. Death is going into the unknown. It's remarkable that no one can experience death and then tell us what it is like. Death is the ultimate unknown. Taxes come a close second. We all pay it in somewhere, but nobody really knows where it actually goes. It disappears. A journey into Never Never land, just as death. We can all hypothesize what happens, but no one knows for sure about either. And it's scary to fantasize about what happens after death or to our taxes. This is where optimism can alleviate our wondering minds from doom and gloom.

Optimism is a belief. I once heard a saying about faith - "Faith is something you believe in that no one in their right mind would believe". Optimism is much like that. Believing that something good will come of a situation that has no obvious "silver lining". And this is something that optimists say when they themselves cannot see a good side to a scenario. They often reply with things like "Well, it must be for the best" or "Something better will come along" or "It wasn't meant to be". What they mean is they don't have a clue why it happened nor can they see a happy outcome. But it is better to believe Aunt Rose died early for a reason, perhaps avoiding a long painful death, than to curse the world which will not change the fact that she did. It is believing something positive that no one in their right mind would believe.

Optimism is positiveness. It is much easier to look at life in a negative way but that makes for miserable people. Very often, the way we view a situation becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Believe bad things will happen, they will. Believe good things will happen and they will. But neither good nor bad will happen 100% of the time no matter how hard we believe. Our thoughts may produce an 80-90% conversion rate. How we handle the 10-20% that goes the other way defines optimism. Still believing something good will come.

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