“Whatever happens, happens for the best” is a well familiar adage which particularly affirms the necessity to think positive. Positive thoughts simply broaden the extent of one’s thinking and aids him to recover through the toughest situations.
Optimism is a state of mind in which a person is calm and composed enough to view the most difficult problem of his life as the most simplest one, and an optimist may be defined as a person who views the things with parity and firmly believes that success and failure are two important phases of life just like two sides of an unbiased coin. An optimist may also be cited as an ardor who is always engrossed in his own work and does not bother about the results and outcomes, while a pessimist may be mentioned as a person who thinks too much about future and fails to act and perform. The difference between the two personalities (the optimist and the pessimist) may be clearly estimated from the following example- seeing a glass filled with water to half the level, a pessimist complains the glass to be partly empty but on the contrary an optimist admires the same glass of water to be partly filled.
This instance clearly distinguishes between the two personalities and evinces that how the two of them view the same problem. On one hand an optimist views the circumstances in the positive way while on the other a pessimist drives the same circumstance to the negative way. As an another example, Napoleon Bonaparte on his way to attack the Austrian army had to pass through the Alps, he glanced at the high peaks and then said to his army “Well, I can’t see any mountains or peaks in my way…do you?”, and with this optimism Napoleon’s army could easily cross the Alps.
Optimism is not just responsible for broadening a person’s way of thinking and viewing the problems, it side by side exhilarates him through every step of life too and thus, makes his life more beatific, happy and cheerful. Optimism does not provide a sure shot solution to a problem but it assures to provide a correct direction so that one can easily work out through the problems. Furthermore, people accost an optimist in their problem, because they know that he might have an alternate solution. This henceforth ameliorates his august and charisma and thus, one can easily infer that optimism pays for itself.
There are couple of reasons why people deviate from the way of being optimist. Some of the reasons being- too much of self contemplation, excessive concern for future, urge to earn more and more lucre et al. In today’s world everyone tends to exaggerate their problems and think that solving a particular problem is out of their ambits. Another reason may be the downfalls i.e. people take their little failures as if they are too huge and, instead of learning from those failures they curse either their fate or they curse God and moreover start taking life as burden. These are some of the roadblocks that hinder a person to comport positively. Also, one fine point needs clarification that being optimistic is good but being panglossian or extremely optimistic may lead to a downfall. Believing in self is good but, just up to a particular limit because an extremely optimistic person does not make an effort to complete his task but instead leaves everything to God and fate and seems to forget that “God helps those, who help themselves”.
In short optimism enables a person to judge and act well in diverse situations and also eases one’s life and makes it more blissful but if the ambits of optimism are crossed it may ruin one’s life. Hence, it is totally one’s hand which way to choose-the Optimistic way, the Pessimistic way or the Panglossian way.
TOEFL listening discussions: A conversation between two students in their first class of the term