Choose Optimism

[brainiac]

Great article by Roger McGough in today's Weekend i. He quotes his poem, written in the 60s:

Everyday I think about dying,
about plague, war, famine,
global warming, the end of the world.
It helps keep my mind off things.

All things must pass, and this plague will, too - eventually. I think we should, like him (aged 82) make the choice to be optimistic in these hard times.

[jno]

When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on

Celia Celia by Adrian Mitchell

[brainiac]

Exactly :)

[jno]

did McGough really write "global warming" in the 60s? It seems anachronistic.

[brainiac]

He says in the article that he frequently revisits poems ('quarrying'), so he might well have done that with this one. He quotes another that he's updated.

[jno]

ah, fair enough.

[aelmpvw]

The oceanographer Wallace Smith Broecker is the man who coined the term “global warming,” way back in 1975

[jourdain2]

I think that all born in the 40's/early 50's grew up with all this around them. It was just always there and we did our angst bit and then learned to live with just knowing about it. We lived through the Cuba crisis and - well, the list is too long. So, yes, all things will pass and we may as well make the best and be optimistic. Mr. J2 was born in 1933 and was an evacuee, did national service marching up and down the Iron Curtain etc. - he is an eternal optimist and frankly he won't accept many more weeks of staying in. You just get on with it.

[jno]

lol, I used to be in the newspaper business during the Cuba crisis. My boss was delighted at the thought of what it would do for sales. Silver linings everywhere!

[vulcan42]

When you live through trying times you generally find optimism rises to the surface. I was in the RAF during the Cuban crisis and after we'd prepared the aircraft to drop bombs on the Soviet Union, we just sat back, we'd done our work. As a friend who was fond of pithy sayings, said at the time" We are all only prawns in a chess game".

[Old_Geezer]

Realists are disappointed less often ;-)