Optimism is a choice and in naming this ideal characteristic, I invited in someone who believes that negative events are temporary, limited in scope, and manageable. At the same time, optimists’ heads aren’t buried in the proverbial sand: they search for ways to help the survivors, or believe there is a cure to cancer, or work to innovate so that the broken systems are better. As Winston Churchill’s famously said, “a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Optimism is living in a spirit of what is possible and, when we begin to look for possibilities in the world around us, we FIND them.
