... a bit of a peek inside my head, for anyone who's interested.

Jen and Morri came up with two answers, optimism and unjaded innocence, which I figured were worth an entry of their own to explain.

At least until Jen and I got together, I never thought of myself as an optimist. Of course, being in love carries its own form of optimism so now things are better, but over the years I've thought of myself as being quite moody.

But I read something somewhere on a website, I can't for the life of me find it again and I can't remember the exact words, but the image of those words has stuck to me since I read it all those years ago. It goes along the lines of this:

The world is random.

Things will happen to make you happy, things will happen to make you sad. Things will happen that will never have any effect on you. The laws of probability are such that you will not be affected by the negative more than the positive, or vice versa. The world is random.

There is only one thing in your life that isn't random, and that's you. From the moment you wake each morning, you are spending every single second of your life trying to make your life better. Whether it's reading or going out with your friends or studying or working or even something as trivial as eating, you are trying to make your life better.

So your life is not random. It's guided, and it's guided towards being better than it is now. Sure, things go wrong, but things also go right - the world is random. You are not. You are guided towards your life being better than it is now.

What's more, by accepting this, you're opening yourself to it. People who refuse to accept that there will be a happily ever after will never have it.

So next time you think your life sucks and can't possibly get any worse, understand that that's just because you're trying to make it better. But the world is random - if the negatives are stopping you now, probability says that the positives will help you later. The world is random. You are not.

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That's about as close as I can remember the words. I found this quite phenomenally awe-inspiring... maybe this might help you guys as well. So the way I see it isn't so much optimism or unjaded innocence, it's acceptance.

Tags: musings
Temperability: thinky thinky

Heard something interesting in a movie today:

We only fear what has happened.

I'd never thought about it before, but I'm inclined to agree... hmmm...

Tags: musings
Temperability: thoughtful