'I became an optimist the night my wife died'

how to be more positive
'I became an optimist the night my wife died' Getty Images

I became an optimist the night my wife died. People reacted in different ways to her diagnosis: an aggressive, fast-spreading ovarian cancer discovered after the miscarriage that ended our first and only pregnancy. Some understood her future was likely to be grim and short; those people mostly kept quiet or stayed away. But many professed to believe that things would somehow work out, often because they could think of no other way to react.

Kathryn insisted that those around her only express hope. Naturally, that applied to me most of all, but I struggled to know how to accommodate her wishes. On one hand, I’d always been inclined to look on the bright side, and some part of me believed it would all work out fine. On the other, I was a rationalist. I read the medical reports and the scientific literature, and realised that Kathryn’s odds of surviving more than a couple of years were small. I concluded that since I wasn’t the one with the terminal illness, I should keep my mouth shut and be supportive in the way my wife had chosen, while hoping for a statistical miracle.

No miracle came. Kathryn’s cancer overran her body’s defences in less than a year, and she endured an unrehearsed and graceless death.

I certainly don’t recommend bereavement as a way of hitting the reset button, but it did give me the opportunity to rethink my life and consider all the possible ways in which I might reconstruct it. At least I still had possibilities to explore.

I was by no means happy or normal during my period of mourning, I just never doubted, even on my darkest days, that better times lay ahead – if I only worked towards them. I realised that I’d chosen to identify as an optimist.

My impression of optimism was that it amounted to nothing more than a belief for those who didn’t want to think hard about the future. But what was the alternative? The usual defence of pessimism is that a pessimist is never disappointed, and can only ever be pleasantly surprised. That seemed a defensive, almost cowardly stance. And professed ‘realism’ seemed to be a cynical excuse to avoid engaging with the possibility that the world could be better than it is today.

At least expecting more out of life primed you to get more out of life. But if I was going to be an optimist, I wanted to practise a kind of optimism for which I could articulate a defence that amounted to more than belief. I wanted to find a way of being an optimist that might help make the world better, rather than just assuming it somehow would be.

What I learned was that optimism, despite my earlier assumptions, isn’t necessarily the product of naivety. It isn’t an indulgence that we can only afford when times are good. It’s a resource we can tap into when the going gets tough – and then it can make the difference between life and death.

9 ways to be more positive

You don't have to be a cheery optimist

My bereavement taught me that being optimistic isn’t the same as being happy. I had a period during which I didn’t know what to think about the world. I did have explicit instructions from Kathryn to not sit in self-pity – she was not a self-pitying kind of person – and that was important. I thought, if I’m going to honour that, I can’t sit around wallowing. In that moment, optimism wasn’t a cheery disposition; it was the belief that there was a future to look forward to.

Obviously, I had thoughts such as, ‘Maybe my life is going to be lonely forever now,’ or ‘Maybe nothing good will ever happen to me again.’ But I still had a belief that this period would pass, and that there would be something on the other side.

That was a self-fulfilling prophecy in many respects. It started out almost tongue-in-cheek. I said, ‘I’m going to be an optimist.’ And then I started thinking, ‘So, what path does my life take now?’ Some of the imagined paths were not particularly attractive; ones where I decided, ‘I give up, I’m going to live in a cottage on the Moors and decline.’ Ones that involved travelling or finding another job. A lot of those possibilities didn’t appeal to me in the long-term, but, by exploring them, I was able to reach towards the future. Optimism in that moment meant asking, ‘How do I get to the other side of this? And what would that look like?’

Look sideways

It doesn’t take much effort to recognise the turning points in your life and how things might have turned out differently. We can dismiss this as wishful thinking, but there is value in taking a sideways look at the choices that weren’t made, the actions that weren’t taken, the paths not trodden: the counterfactuals. We can ask the question we’ve all asked, at one time or another: ‘What if?’

This doesn’t have to mean weighing up which path would’ve been better or worse – what’s happened has happened. But it is useful to realise that something else could have happened. There are always branching points where your life could have gone in a different direction. I think when you remember that, it makes the present feel less inevitable. It reminds you that many things are possible. We’re not on railway tracks. We get to places in life through a mix of accident, choice and circumstance – and there is always space for agency amidst all that.

how to be more positive
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Optimism is not blind faith

The difference between optimism and blind faith is the expectation that you have to do the work. There’s a popular school of thought that if you simply set yourself up to be receptive then good things will happen – manifestation practices that focus more on your expectations than actions. Actually, I think you’re more likely to succeed if you’re thinking concretely about your goals, and expect to have to work to realise them – even if you don’t know exactly what form that work will take – rather than just waiting for things to sort themselves out. You can’t take it for granted that positive things will come to you just because you stay open to them. Optimists are thought to do well in life because they
are better at visualising what they want, coping with setbacks and switching tack when things aren’t working out – active, rather than passive, belief.

But it does require imagination

Of course, it’s not very often that we know exactly how to get from A to B, but if you acknowledge where B is, your brain will start figuring out ways to get there. Simply imagining an outcome will help you start making decisions that will set you in that direction. One way to set this in motion is to try the ‘Best Possible Self’ exercise, invented by Laura King of Southern Methodist University in 2001. Spend 15 minutes each day writing about the version of yourself in a future where everything has gone right. All your efforts have paid off and you have accomplished everything you ever wanted to; then spend five minutes imagining that future.

Be optimistic about each other

A lot of us find it easier to be optimistic about our individual lives than about wider issues, such as climate change or social inequality. There are two competing factors to this: one is we tend to think we are special, and we extend that halo effect to our friends, family and to people we know and like. We’re less optimistic about people further away from us, and that eventually crosses over into negativity bias, a mode where we’re looking for threats. Essentially, we become bad news detectors, and in today’s media environment, bad news travels faster and further than good news.

Things are better than we think

There’s an increasing gap between how negatively we think about our society versus what the statistics say. We’re inclined to think that crime and the economy are much worse than they are according to the data. In some sense it’s hard to say who’s correct – after all, if we feel a certain way about how we live, it makes no difference how great the data is.

It’s also a natural human tendency to think that things were better a generation ago, and that the troubles you face now are unique. Of course, each generation has its own problems, but it is useful to think about the fact that people have faced adversity before, and got through it. That should inspire us. What I see in the climate change debate, for example, is a lot of the discussion being shut down before it gets started. When something is suggested, an immediate reaction is to say: well, that’s not going to work. My attitude is that we often just don’t know whether that’s true or not – and that’s reason enough to talk, think and test further.

Pessimism has its upsides

While optimism can help us achieve great things, it’s also fair to say that it can sometimes get in the way. If you’re running a project, for example, there are many ways in which budgets and deadlines have to be calculated to try and remove optimism from the process. It’s difficult to get rid of it entirely – which is why you so often see big construction projects getting massively delayed and overspending hugely – but in those cases people do at least recognise that optimism can be an issue.

Then there are some professions where pessimism can be helpful: lawyers, insurers and aircraft designers all need to seek out ways things can go wrong. I think what can be useful, as Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci put it, is ‘pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will’. Or in other words, an ability to recognise and evaluate problems, but be determined to overcome them and press on anyway.

Accept there may be solutions you can't see

Often when you look at problems, it’s easy to suggest reasons that the solutions at hand won’t work. What’s harder is to accept that you should try to keep exploring possibilities because there may be solutions that you can’t even picture yet. There are often unsuspected solutions out there, but we won’t find them unless we go looking for them. And, quite often, we stumble across them while looking for something else.

Believe in each other

Collective action problems – such as climate change – require us all to do something. You have to be optimistic that other people will do their part simply because we can’t individually change things. I don’t think we currently live in an environment that encourages that trust, even though evidence of it is all around us. There’s lots of evidence that humans are pro-social – inclined to get along and work towards common goals
– but we need to believe that other people will work towards them, too. Or to put it another way, we need to be optimistic about optimism.


The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury

£15.39 at

The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have The Power To Change The World (Canongate) by Sumit Paul-Choudhury is is out now



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