Potential Realized
I was accused of being an optimist. The prevailing winds were wary, cautious, and even skeptical, which imbued my position with naïveté and denial, but I decided to own it.
“Life and history have taught us to be wary of one another,” I acknowledged. “But might it not be possible to push through the wounds and disappointments to imagine different outcomes—and reroute? We could surprise everyone, even ourselves.”
I was thinking that despair, after all, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shouldn’t we leave some room for better prospects?
“You’re optimistic” he said again, in an elder-to-grasshopper way. He did not specifically say that such pushing and rerouting was impossible, but he seemed to view it as unlikely.
The next day I told my friend Jim about this exchange. “Do you know what the difference is between an optimist and pessimist?” he asked.
I figured he was about to offer up the old droll ditty about seeing the donut versus seeing the hole.
“No,” said Jim, “not that, but it’s simple. The optimist says this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist agrees.”
Yes! It’s not what we see; it’s how we see it.
And sometimes what we perceive is discretionary. For example, I realized only recently that I choose a lens each morning through which to view the day ahead, and to a great extent, I decide in that moment whether it will be shitty or fine. I have days when everyone seems beautiful to me, and days when humans are ugly and awful and I hate them. Of course, it has occurred to me that I might be creating some of the ugliness or beauty by the filter I choose and the energy I put forth.
Forgive that small digression into my theory of perception and choice. It’s relevant, perhaps, but what I want to talk about here is optimism.
Or maybe optimism isn’t even the right word. I think what I really mean is hope.
The very insightful writer Rebecca Solnit has explored this topic deeply and shared many observations about the difference between hope and optimism. “Hope,” she has written, “is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.”
Doesn’t that nail it? It’s the rigidity of both positions–optimism and pessimism–that render them unhelpful. Hope, on the other hand, has an expansiveness to it. It encourages us to imagine, and to try, and to animate potential.
Animation of potential. Now there’s a concept.
Yesterday I had the honor of witnessing the launch of a beautiful Chumash tomol at a place along the shore where the Chumash ancestors had paddled such boats centuries earlier. It’s a large canoe built of redwood plank, sealed with tar, adorned with decorative panels inlaid with abalone symbols of stars, sun, swordfish—an absolute work of art, “the house of the sea,” as Fernando Librado called it.
The Chumash were skilled mariners and fishers, and these their native waters. This morning’s voyage was more than recreation and spectacle: there was a deep, palpable undercurrent of tradition and reverence here. A quiet ceremonial gathering took place in a circle beforehand.
The strength and effort of many hands were required to carry and push the vessel through the sand to the shore and into the surf, but when it met the sea, it was born. It lifted, like a living thing, its meaning made manifest in buoyancy. Six paddlers crouched on their knees inside it, and the strokes of their paddles were like the rays of a sun, synchronized in a circular kind of symmetry, propelling the boat with surprising swiftness through the water. Potential realized.
On shore, the atmosphere was both festive and somehow—dare I say?—holy. The sun had come out after days of gray. Someone had seen bear tracks on the beach and had pictures to prove it. Pelicans were gliding just above the water, which was indigo and sparkly, and in patches darkened by kelp. Years ago, a ranch hand who grew up here in the 1930s told me that he used to lie on the kelp beds and be rocked to sleep. Now, looking out, I pictured him as the little boy he once was, asleep in his cradle of kelp; I remembered the old man he became, and the tree he planted, which still stands, and the gift of the stories he gave me.
I thought too about a little girl who once wore a chain of seaweed like a boa, then swung and waved it in a dance with her friends. It seemed to be part of the spell that was cast upon children here, that in this place they must run and dance, and if possible do a cartwheel. Now two small boys were digging in the sand and racing in circles and climbing on a silver emergency boat, and a woman in a long pink skirt and wide straw hat was sitting on the shore sketching. But most of us were just standing around watching the tomol grow smaller with distance, feeling giddy and grateful to be here.
And the ancestors were present also, in their ancestral way; of this I have no doubt. As a wise elder once told me, “Whether you believe in them or not, they are here.”
It’s an epic saga, and I’m honored to bear witness. Everything seems so intense to me lately. I think it’s a part of being in the foothills of old age, to use Leonard Cohen’s term. There’s a poignancy and acuity to the whole procession, an unfiltered infusion of sensation, and a staggering sense of wonder and gratitude, tinged with the anticipatory grief of soon departing.
I’m no fool: I’ve been through my share of portals and passages, and I’m aware that there’s misery and suffering out there, but maybe my hope is an instrument for survival, and maybe my delight is as real as my sadness, and maybe the potential for things turning out okay is slightly boosted when we don’t stand in the way and decide it cannot be.
In the night, Venus rose above the hills in the northwest sky, shining like a torch.