Optimist, Pessimist, Realist?

“I know I can keep doing this til May 1st. We are doing good! “

I announced this to my husband as he cloroxed the counter for the ump-teenth time and I washed my hands...again. He just laughed and responded,

“So May 2nd comes around and we are still in mandated social distancing time and you are going to do what? Give up? Stay in bed? Hide under the covers? Fall apart? What?”

Are you an optimist, pessimist or a realist and who makes it through “best” in these unprecedented times?

This question reminds me of what I learned from Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning.

He wrote that pessimists gave up hope right off the bat and perished. Optimistic prisoners within Nazi concentration camps usually died around Christmas time. He believed that they were so hopeful they'd be out by Christmas that they simply died of hopelessness when that didn't turn out to be true.

Prisoner of war for seven years during the Viet Nam war, James Stockdale, has a principle coined after him which also speaks of this reality.

Stockdale speaks about how the optimists fared in camp. The dialogue goes:
"Who didn't make it out?"
"Oh, that's easy," he said. "The optimists."
"The optimists? I don't understand," I said, now completely confused.
"The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart."


Who survived were the realists. The ones who took it one day at a time and didn’t put a timeline on their hope.
It’s the upbeat “the sun will come up tomorrow” people mixed with “and today is really hard and that’s okay” attitude that survives.

My husband gave me a healthy reality check of - It is what it is, and it can be this way until whenever, and it’s all good.

So we are taking it one day at a time around here.
Some days I sit on my couch and watch too much t.v. and other days I tackle my entire to-do list.

We will make it through to May 1st and May 2nd and beyond.

We can realistically do this!