It is said, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Despite my reservations regarding describing anyone as pessimist or optimist, as it is quality that shapes one’s life out of the thinking style he decided to adopt, each of us holds his own view of the events and his own way of judging them. Some don’t see anything but difficulty, defeat or pain in all his daily life. Others focus on their way, target or what they learnt from those situations no matter how hard they were. This is how each one of us had a different pattern of thinking, behaving in different situations.
One of valuable life principles is that you should not use one color for all the situations you face, that is, black-and-white way of thinking. You should rather adopt a comprehensive way of thinking that compares the demerits and demerits of each matter. That makes me recall a story I once read: 2016 was to bring down the curtains and a new year to come, a man sat holding a pen in his hands and started to jot down all what he thought of the previous year and its past events, so he found the words flowing on papers and kept on writing and writing and writing. When he finished, he started to read all what he wrote, he found he wrote about the surgery he underwent to remove his gallbladder that made him stay in bed for months. He also made it to 60, so he left his dear job that he was doing for 30 years. In that same year he lost his dad after he went through the turmoil of his son’s failure at faculty of Medicine due to a car accident. He concluded what he wrote saying, “It was a terrible year”
While he was busy thinking, his wife knocked the door and entered to find him look so gloomy that he even didn’t notice her entrance. She approached him taking silent steps when he eyes fell on the last words he wrote. She left the room quietly and came back carrying another paper. She put the paper next to the one her husband wrote. The man looked astonished when he read what was written….
To be continued
General Bishop
Head of the Coptic Orthodox Cultural Center
