I’m convinced that this blind date occurs sooner or later in most parallel universes. It’s almost a law of physics. Or a law of Murphy. It’s a law of something, anyway.
Perhaps Optimism slows down for once, maybe for just a few minutes, and his buddy Pragmatism finally has a chance to set him up on this rendezvous.
“Well,” Optimism thinks, “she has an accent in her name! That sounds exotic! I’m sure she’ll be wonderful! Everything is going to work out just fine!”
(Optimism has a tendency to end most sentences in exclamation points. Because of course he does.)
But the longer Optimism has been running around single, living the high life, the longer he’s been seeing the potential for good in the people around him, and concluding that they’re capable of achieving greatness with the right ideas and motivation. And the more convinced of that he becomes, the more disastrous this encounter will be.
He’s been out there giving pep talks, being the wind beneath people’s wings, lending a helping hand, making suggestions, raising funds, starting petitions, and doing whatever he can to make the world a better place, because he knows the world can be a better place. He feels it in the marrow of his bones. He has total faith that there will be a better tomorrow if we all work toward that goal.
He also has faith that this blind date will be a pure delight. What could possibly go wrong? The world, after all, is his oyster!
And when he sees her, she takes his breath away. She’s stunning. When she looks up at him, her eyes are these huge pools of angelic innocence. He finds himself falling. Falling…
It’s a heady, dizzy feeling, like laughing gas at the dentist’s office. He feels slightly helpless and afraid, but at the same time, he’s enjoying it and never wants it to end. It’s like a siren song. Could this be love?
But then he wakes up the next morning feeling as if he’s been drugged. He’s in his own place, and Naiveté is nowhere to be found, but that’s only because, he now realizes, she’s been there all along. She’s been a part of him.
She has been the reason he could be so optimistic! He had been seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. And yes, while he had made some positive differences, for the most part, his efforts had come to naught. Especially those efforts that required others to jump on the bandwagon.
A lot of people, he realized, just couldn’t be bothered to move beyond the status quo. They had already given up on making the world a better place. For the most part, he had been spitting in the wind.
Suddenly, he felt really tired. He was sorely tempted to pull the sheets back over his head, curl up into a fetal position, and try to remember what Naiveté’s beautiful eyes looked like.
But then the phone rings. It’s his friend Pragmatism.
Picking up, he moans, “Dude, why would you send me on a date with her, of all people?”
“Sorry, Buddy. I felt like I had to. People were starting to laugh at you. You had lost touch with reality.”
“Great. But now I feel horrible. People suck. What’s the point in trying?”
(His exclamation points have deflated into a question mark.)
“Well, now it’s time for you to have a date with me. But if you get a knock on your door before that, promise me one thing. Do not answer it, okay?”
“Why not?”
“You’re just going to have to trust me on this. I know you’re pissed at me at the moment, but trust me, okay? Your future is at stake. Promise?”
Optimism sighs heavily. “Fine. Whatever. I promise.”
The second he hangs up, he hears someone banging on the door, as if they’d break the thing down if given the opportunity. He jumps up and tiptoes to the peephole.
“I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! LET ME IN!!! NOW!!!”
The banging continues. Optimism slides a chair under the doorknob and hopes that Pragmatism will get there soon, because this is a scary, scary guy, and he can already tell he wouldn’t enjoy his company, like, at all.
All of this got me thinking about Anne Frank.
I know. Kind of a weird transition. But one of the things that I loved most about The Diary of Anne Frank was that I was her age when I first read it, and she quite obviously went through so much more than I ever had or ever would, and yet she still managed to maintain these bursts of optimism that could not be quenched, in spite of everything.
Perhaps she had yet to fully recognize her own Naiveté, because she certainly had every reason to let Cynicism in when it pounded on her door, and yet somehow she never did. Even in the camps, from what we’re told, she didn’t do that. She didn’t give up.
It’s heartbreaking, of course, but it’s also fascinating to see such optimism in its purest form. This is a girl who could write, with total sincerity, “I believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
What follows is another quote of hers, about women’s rights, that I only recently came across. It shows how much her Naiveté fueled her optimism, because to this day, women’s rights still haven’t reached the point that she so optimistically portrayed them as having reached on Tuesday, June 13, 1944, the day after her 15th birthday.
Part of me is glad she never had to see how disastrously wrong she was about our rights. She would not have taken it well. But then, she might have made a huge difference, because she was truly amazing.
We’ll never know, though, because she died about nine months later, most likely of typhus, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
Her optimistic voice will live on, however. And it will continue to inspire girls to become amazing women. So maybe she did impact the women’s movement after all.
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