Optimistic thoughts and memories of a Thai friend

By Austin Bukenya

Do you remember your 2020 New Year resolutions? How well are you keeping them? Such questions might have sounded flippant at other times. But it helps to ask them, and answer them, in these uniquely terrifying days, when we need all our wits about us for our basic survival.

Let me start by sharing with you the password to my magic survival formula. It is simply “plus plus”, lower case, with a few addition signs in between to make the requisite number of characters, thus, “p+l+u+s+p+l+u+s”. The addition sign is also a symbol for the positive, and we might as well have made “positive” our password. But, in our rapidly changing language, “positive” is not always good news, as when one tests “positive” for one virus or another!

Yet our business here is “good news”, the positive plus that adds life, power, hope and peace to our existence – all things bright and beautiful. I am an optimist and I live in the faith that there is some goodness in every situation and there is a possible happy ending to every story. Our business is to look for that goodness that best of all possible endings, and go for it.

OPTIMISM

We optimists are not idle dreamers. As Elder Philip Ochieng will tell you, both “optimism” and “pessimism” are, in their origin, comparative terms. Optimism refers to the best, the “optimal”, aspects in a situation, while pessimism dwells on the worst scenario aspects.

Reality is reality, with all its flowers and thorns, mountains and valleys, joys and sorrows. But the way we experience it, negotiate through it and profit from it depends on our approach to it.

When an optimist is betrayed in love, he or she may survive with the brave affirmation, “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” as Alfred Lord Tyson has it. The pessimist on the other hand will fume with deadly venom, “who needs a heart where hearts can be broken?” as Tina Turner sang.

Maybe I was not always an optimist myself. Looking back on the characters I created in my early narratives, plays and verse, I see clear signals of a naïve pessimism. The speaker in my “I Met a Thief”, for example, concludes his tale of abandonment by a prospective lover with the lament that his “carcase” was left “roasting in the fires she’d lit.”

When and where exactly I converted to my incurable optimism, I cannot say with certainty. It is probably somewhere in the late 1980s, when I was going through a barrage of personal, spiritual and family upheavals.

Subsequent reflection and interactions with a number of good friends, including Piang Chai, my Thai comrade on an American Studies programme in 1988, gradually revealed to me the futility of pessimism and the desirability of an aggressive optimism for survival and happiness in life.

SYMPATHETIC

Piang Chai, whom I ended up calling “my perfect cup of tea”, was a strikingly tranquil and sympathetic lady who, for some reason, took a keen interest in me and somehow noticed the kind of knotted-up state I was in in those days.

From her Buddhist perspective, she attributed my problems to my pessimistic outlook on life in those days. We, however, will save for another day the story of our conversations and how they contributed to my journey towards optimism.

What I wanted to share with you is how optimism works, even in a challenging situation. I illustrate with reference to my new year resolutions, now sorely tested, like yours and everyone else’s, by the coronavirus pandemic. The basic concept in optimism is that you are programmed to look for the good and positive in every situation and then work to optimise or maximise it.

2020 RESOLUTIONS

Just to remind you, my four sanguine 2020 resolutions were that I would live, love, learn and labour. I called them the four Ls. But that was, obviously, before the pandemic hit us. Are my resolutions still relevant? Can I apply them usefully to managing and alleviating my pandemic situation?

I cannot give you all the detailed answers. But that is just what I would like you to do with your own resolutions. Recall them, reassess them and see how you can creatively apply them to your surroundings and circumstances. I promise you will find the exercise worthwhile.

In my case, for example, when I remember my resolution to live, I feel grateful for my good health up to now, and for the good health of those, like you, my reader, whom I love and value, realising that we cannot take it for granted. Strong, beautiful and precious people are suddenly and frighteningly leaving us. I am thinking particularly of our Dr Doreen Adisa Lugaliki, whom I would have called “umukhana” (young woman) back home because she was of my children’s rika.

Such bereavements should strengthen our resolve to take care of our individual and collective health and lives by observing not only the expert advice given us against Covid-19 but also such common sense habits as careful road use and keeping our surroundings clean.

KEEP LEARNING

My last example comes from my resolution to keep learning. My optimism excites in me not only the necessity of learning the newspeak of lockdowns, social distance and SOPs (standard operation procedures) but also the need to adequately absorb and process the avalanche of information, and misinformation, around us. The coronavirus and its Covid-19 concomitant are probably the most documented, “statisticised” and reported phenomenon in human history.

A lot of figures, facts, ideas, opinions, and lies, is loaded every second on our lightning-fast electronic communication channels. One cannot cope and stay sane in the face of this deluge unless one learns how to receive, analyse and usefully apply the messages. I am also learning the sterling virtue of sometimes “switching off” the pandemonium and enjoying precious moments of quiet reflection.

Over to you, and your reflections and resolutions in the remaining 2020 half-year. Stay safe.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and literature; [email protected]