As a way of establishing your attitude to life, it’s
become a bit of a cliché. Is your glass half full or half empty?
If it’s half full, you’re an optimist, an enthusiast,
always seeing the positive side of things.
You’re a can-do person who won’t be put off by the fact that the going
looks tough. If your glass is
half-empty, you always look on the negative side of things. You’re a pessimist, a wet blanket, a party
pooper, a prophet of doom and a real sourpuss.
Go away, Mr. or Ms. Half Empty!
Of course, there is, as always, a third way of looking
at these things: http://www.lolroflmao.com/2011/07/30/half-full-half-empty-i-think-this-is-piss/
Or maybe not.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently and have
come to the conclusion that sometimes (but not always) it’s important to view
life from the half-full perspective. The
negative side of being an optimist is that you may be inclined to ignore the
imperfections in the status quo and take the attitude that it will be all right
on the night. Or, as they say Down Under, “She’ll be apples, mate!”
I realise, of course, that highlighting the
disadvantages of being an optimist is a very half-empty thing to do. But my point is that there is also an upside
to being a half-empty person. When the
menace of Hitler was growing in Europe, dear old Neville Chamberlain’s upbeat
speech about peace in our time on his return from meeting the Fuhrer in Munich
was the 1930s equivalent of “she’ll be apples, mate”. It was Winston Churchill whose glass was half
empty. Well, actually, his drinking
habits were such that it was probably quite difficult to keep pace with the
state of his glass. But, metaphorically
speaking, he took the half empty approach as he warned anyone who would listen
that Hitler wasn’t a harmless Charlie Chaplin lookalike.
A hundred years earlier, it was Charles Dickens who saw
beneath the surface of Victorian life and did
battle with what he called “the infamous record of small official inhumanity”,
recognising that an apparently decorous and righteous society’s glass was
definitely half-empty.
To be fair, maybe the real heroes are those
who can see things both ways. They are
constructively dissatisfied. They have
enough divine discontent to see that the status quo has to change and enough
positive energy and vision to believe that they can make the change
happen. Or, as Robert Kennedy famously
said: “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I
dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
So let’s celebrate those who, like Robert Kennedy,
are able to see the reality that if your glass is half full, it is also half
empty. I’ll raise a (full) glass to that!
