It's nice when optimism actually pays off.
At college, it's easy to let pessimism morph from an occasional disturbance into an everyday occurrence. That test in a core curriculum class you're probably not learning anything vital from puts you in a sour mood and makes it easier to snap at a good friend. The time you spend working on the inevitable five-page paper from the overzealous professor makes it that much harder to find some much-needed relaxation time. For those who work, that annoying co-worker puts a damper on even the best of days.
Before long, even the inconsequential things are reason enough to pull out the pity pot to throw a woe-is-me party. The good times are interspersed with the bad, but it's hard to remember them with everything piling up. Then, a legitimately adverse situation comes at the most inopportune time and pushes you that much closer to the edge.
For me, the edge came rushing up a bit more than a week ago. Vandalism of a simple survey I was moderating for the Daily News pushed me right over the limit. In the most pessimistic of moods, I even wrote a column about what had happened. I wrote with an infinitesimal bit of illogical hope that it might actually change things somehow.
I found out the shred of hope I had left was warranted. There was nothing I could do about the vandalism or the time I had to spend fixing it, but simply writing about the situation in hopes it would prompt someone into action actually worked.
As it turns out, my survey vandal (more accurately vandals, as I would find out) had that sense of right and wrong I assumed was lost on everyone. The vandals came to me, prompted by the column, and told me why they had corrupted my survey with 7,711 identical responses. They told me their actions weren't malicious. They even asked if they could help fix the situation in any way.
But best of all, they came to me and apologized for their actions.
I couldn't have hoped for such an amazing reaction to the column. In my pessimistic mood, the odds of my writing spurring something positive instead of more and more negativity were about as good as the odds that Gov. Sarah Palin would finally show her intellectual side. There was a slight chance at best, but in both cases the resignation that my optimism probably wouldn't come to anything was almost immediate. Thankfully, that feeling was quickly changed when the vandals did the right thing.
Before all this happened, I was on the road to unhappiness. People were inherently bad, and any good that was done was because of mere happenstance and nothing more. The survey vandalism and the events that followed reminded me that no matter what's piling up, everyone should start their day with the basic premise that things are going to go well and people are basically good.
The reaffirmation of the good that most people carry around on a daily basis was nothing short of miraculous. Suddenly, where there had been poor thoughts and even poorer attitudes there was a healthy outlook that fueled a more productive lifestyle. If people were willing to recognize the wrong in their ways and admit it, then anything was possible. From now on, it's something I'll hold on to, and I hope you do too.
Now if professors would only realize that it's more positive when students have less coursework to do, the world would be nearly perfect.
Write to Logan at lmbraman@bsu.edu
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