On “Why”: Pt 1 of ??
Pollyanna, from my understanding, is a term used for anyone who is overly optimistic about any circumstance, including negative ones.
For example, let’s say a person gets his hand crushed by a cheese press that was randomly placed on the sidewalk, in front of an abandoned shoe store, by a homicidal maniac with an overbite and a Flock of Seagulls haircut.
Now, this person can use his hand again after many years of painful rehab, but it will never be 100%. Sure, he can use that hand to point me to the direction of the nearest Cheesecake Factory, but he will never be able to toss a salad with those large, wooden serving utensils.
This upsets our protagonist as he really can’t eat salad if it isn’t evenly coated with weak balsamic vinaigrette dressing. And his main character flaw is that he can’t trust anyone but himself to make his perfect salad. It is obvious he is SoL.
Obviously, these recent turn of events has made our guy very sour. And yet, when he shares his concerns with an old high school friend, that friend responds by saying, “Don’t be so down! I’m sure you’ll find a way to make your salad! At least you didn’t crush your dominant hand!”
That friend would be called a Pollyanna. And for a long time, I had a deep aversion to that archetype. For reasons I will go into in the future, I have adopted a very pessimistic outlook on life.
The downside this is longer bouts of depression. After all, what’s the point in living if you can’t see the bright side of things. Why would one bother to try at all? This makes is very hard to pull myself out of a funk.
I wasted my entire twenties and much of my thirties with this mindset. Any time I tried to work on a dream, like my writing or fitness, I’d find a way to tell myself “what’s the point?”
This is especially true when I hit a plateau and I didn’t know where to go next. I’d just give up and go back to being a Starcraft-playing hermit.
You would think that with this negative outlook I would have died or killed myself along the way. However, I am in my forties and I am still here. It turns out a person can get old with a shitty quality of life, both physically and mentally.
It’s really been only recently where I actually wanted something better for myself. And so I worked towards that better quality life for the majority of 2021. And for a bit, I was succeeding. But it is really easy to do that when I started from zero. It was easy to stay motivated for the sake of it when I kept seeing improvement on a regular basis.
But now I have hit a plateau and I have started to backslide. I’ve already lost quite a few of my gains from last year. Here’s a quick list of what’s gone wrong:
I can’t hike as far as I used to.
Walking doesn’t feel that great.
I’ve been eating crap for most weeks.
I haven’t been getting the right amount of sleep.
If history is to be any indication, I am very likely to give up and become a YouTube-watching hermit (I have since quit Starcraft—my hands aren’t as quick as they used to be).
I am not giving up. Rather, I am using this as an opportunity to really understand why I do this to myself.
Or, maybe the answer doesn’t lie in the statement “why I do this,” but in the question “why I should bother?”
Whatever the “why” is, I look forward to exploring this more in future entries, which is why I don’t know how many parts this feature will take. I get the feeling that it will take a while to end.
That said, anyone who has dabbled in philosophy knows that there really is no end to it.
Or maybe finding out the why isn’t relevant at all. The only thing that matters is that I’m plugging along. After all, I could die at any moment.
Maybe a random cheese press will fall on my head and it will all be over. I think this is preferable to dying from inertia.
