French Mustard & Pragmatic Optimism
What a milestone birthday taught me about significance, survival, and self-worth
On my 50th birthday I was not happy with the world. My business was a mess. My family was out of tune. My waist was a complete waste and so were my finances. I’d been in my fifth car accident, (none were my fault) and didn’t really feel like dealing with the pain, physical and financial side-effects that went with someone else’s inept move. The idea of celebrating aging, well, let’s say I was at best unenthusiastic about the concept. I just wanted to run away. Because I am a pragmatic optimist, I didn’t want to crash my whole life, so instead, I ran away for the day.
I am not an ‘it’s my birthday week’ or ‘celebrate me all month’ kind of person, but I knew I needed to make the day significant somehow or I would risk losing just a little bit more of me, and there wasn’t much left to lose. So, I packed a camp chair, a book, and stopped at Hallmark for a journal and new, colorful makers. I trekked, by myself, (in a bit of a pity party) to Red Lodge and spent about $100 on a sausage, cheese and wine kind of picnic.
As I sat by the creek, snarfing gourmet olives and expensive French mustard (thank you Babcock and Miles) on this significant birthday (as those with a zero at the end tend to be), I decided to celebrate everyone who had been significant in my life. Now I could celebrate them by thinking of them as I inhaled expensive chocolate or sipped dessert wine, but that didn’t seem significant enough. So I used my fancy new markers and wrote letters to each of them — even those who were long dead or so lost I had no idea how to find them. In happy colors, I told them how what they had done, little or big, to impact my life in a significant way, mattered.
I wrote to teachers, bosses, friends, and even a couple of people who had let me down so hard that I looked at life through a different lens after knowing them. I laughed. I cried. And, I just kept writing, forgetting the nibbles, lost in the power of human experience of significance. By the time I went home — long after I had expected to — I was a new me, a happier me. I had shed the woe is me, and became a joy is me person. She was the woman I wanted to be, who looked for the best, knowing that clouds often cover the sun, but that the sun always returns.
That, my friend, is pragmatic optimism. As a pragmatic optimist, I know that everything will be okay. I have a strong faith, a powerful can-do attitude, and an unwavering belief that humans want to be their best when dealing with me, even if their best is not quite up to snuff. I look for smiles behind tears, laughs behind sneers, and I graciously accept the drivers who have blinkers but don’t use them because they are concerned about light pollution.
Pragmatic optimism means that you believe things will work out, but with the acknowledgement that ‘working out’ might take a lot of work. Working out might, and probably will, require looking at things in new ways, admitting failure, and starting over more than once. It requires a lot of grace. An idealistic optimist is certain everything will just magically come to be. A pragmatic optimist knows that’s probably not the case.
When you are a pragmatic optimist, you must be willing to begin again. And again. And, once again. You get to start over. You get to rise up. Overcome. Shake it off. Survive to thrive. Thrive to survive. Pivot, quit, and scream. But during this journey, a pragmatic optimist swirls in the laughter, wherever they can find it and tries to dive out of range of the direct hits. We give grace to ourselves, and our legions of supporters and we gracefully dump those that no longer deserve our loving attitudes.
I protect my pragmatic optimism at all times. I filter what I read, watch and listen to, not to the point that I have a myopic view of the world, but do I really need to know who is dating who this week? No, I do not. Do I really need to hear the same news segment every 20 minutes eight hours a day? No, I do not. Is there any value in borrowing trauma from crime podcasts and shoot ‘em up movies? No, not for me. (Just so you know, I feel the same about saccharine love stories, so movie night at our house is a lot of fun. We scroll, scroll and scroll some more looking for something, then we usually go for a walk.)
I allot time for news, time for reels and time for really listening to those in my life who bring me joy. When my feet hit the floor in the morning, I put them in boots and hit the trail. Only after I have greeted the sun, walked the steps and gotten right with the day do I touch my phone, turn on the radio, or put buds in my ears. All I want to hear at dawn is the joy of a new beginning: birdsong, crunchy footsteps and a happy dog barking now and then. That routine makes me happy and gets me ready to face reality.
Ever since that significant birthday, I have spent my birthdays in the same way. Just me, new pens, cards, and a picnic lunch by the creek. I don’t always write to others about their significance, but I do take time to celebrate others and what they mean to me. Then, I celebrate who I am and what I mean to me. We do that too seldom, stop and think about how we show up in the world, and how we take care of ourselves.
This birthday practice, which can be done any day I want to do it, allows me to reset and greet new wrinkles with aplomb and pragmatic acceptance. I mention the wrinkles because while writing this column, one of my co-conspirators for a business project asked first for my driver’s license, then he had to verify it was me with facial recognition. It took three times. This summer my face seemed to slide down three notches, and while that’s not very funny, it is the privilege of being alive long enough to be almost old.
And, when you are almost old, you have lived long enough to know that some days will be a picnic, some will be in the ICU, and it is the people who have had a significant impact on your life that matter most. Choose them well. Also know that you are someone’s sunshine, they need you. (If you are someone’s cloud, you might want to tidy that up.) No matter what happens, know that better days always follow bad days, and that a really good French mustard can change your whole perspective.
