I run. At least sometimes I run. One of the tricks I’ve discovered is that you can convince yourself of things when you run, especially over a longer distance where the end seems very far away. I can run for 1km. At the end of that 1km I can tell myself the same thing. I can run for 1km. And I can. Just keep moving. It’s a mindset that is rooted firmly in the reality of this moment. All I can do is breathe and run… or stop. But I’m not going to stop because the race isn’t done yet and I can still breathe and run. It might hurt. I might be tired. I might really want it to stop but that’s for sometime in the future. For now I know I can run 1km, so I run that 1km. One breath at a time and one step at a time because that’s the only place I can be at that moment.
I wrote yesterday about the Stockdale Paradox which suggests that optimism is easily defeated in the face of longterm daily difficulty. Understandably optimists wanted to challenge that idea. Being an optimist is encouraged and seen as a positive thing. Why would you want to be a pessimist? Isn’t it better to see the world in a positive light?
Yes… but…
Yes, being positive is good. But, the Stockdale Paradox suggests that positivity requires to be firmly grounded in the current reality. Today is what matters most. The positivity required is to know that ‘Things will change. This won’t last forever.’
In Stockdale’s case as a POW in Vietnam that change could have been two things:
- At some point the war will end and he will be freed
- At some point he would die (which in our faith is not a bad thing!)
There are two important parts to those changes:
At some point – not tomorrow, not next week, not by Christmas. At some point. I have no idea when that is, but I know for certain that it will happen.
Change – whatever is happening now will change. This will not last forever. But for now this is what I have and I need to deal with today fully and consciously.
Optimists, in Stockdale’s experience, don’t think like that.
Cambridge dictionary defines Optimism as: the quality of being full of hope and emphasising the good parts of a situation, or a belief that something good will happen.
Stockdale observed that being full of hope does’t leave much room for recognising the grim reality of the present bad situation. Emphasising the good parts doesn’t leave much room for the pain, grief and hurt of this moment. Believing that something good will happen isn’t based on any evidence that something good is likely to happen soon. Someone somewhere will make things better for me… when in reality things could, and may very well, get worse.
Others have come to the same conclusions. Viktor Frankl observed the same thing among the others he spent time with in Nazi concentration camps. Those who found meaning and purpose in the moment, in the reality of their daily life, no matter how terrible that daily life was, did much better than those who were optimists, those who believed that something good would happen, that someone somewhere would change things in a positive way in the near future.
I wonder if even Jesus was in on this too…
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Matthew 6:34
So, when I wrote that optimism might not be the most helpful approach to the situation the church finds itself in, it was a call to that balance between knowing that things will change (and that may or may not be positive in the short term – new possibilities will arise but churches will close & people will experience great hurt) and the absolutely honest appreciation of the situation we find ourselves in every day and giving our full attention to that, knowing that good or bad, this moment won’t last forever.