d.: Well, Cal.E. is still on the lam. I would like to delve into some other sayings that may be either true or false or helpful or detrimental today.
First, I want to start by quoting the fictional philosopher Rocky Balboa.
“Yo, Adrian, I was wonderin’, if you aren’t doing anything for the next twenty or thirty years, if you would mind marrying me very much?” It is, perhaps, the most romantic line ever uttered in the movies. I rank it in ahead of “Here’s looking at you kid,” as well as “We’ll always have Paris.” I even thought about using this line when I asked my wife to marry me. It would NOT have worked, though. Her name is not Adrian. I had to come up with something a little more original.
The second line is also from the classic movie, “Rocky” (renamed “Rocky 1” when the other fourteen movies came into existence). When asked by Adrian’s (Talia Shire) father figure, Pauly, who was her brother and Rocky’s (Sylvester Stallone) trainer, why Rocky would like to marry his sister, Rocky uttered these classic lines. “Me, I got gaps. And Adrian, she’s got gaps. But together, we got no gaps.” (As Sly puts his fingers on his left hand between the fingers on his right hand, showing Pauly that the union would be a solid one.) I have actually heard this line used at a marriage conference. I am going to go with a true statement on this one. The other quote that goes along with the brilliant fictional philosopher, Rocky Balboa, is from a real person. The late Ruth Bell Graham was once asked if she and her husband, the late Evangelist Billy Graham, if the two were very similar. Her answer was, “No. If two people are exactly the same, one of you is unnecessary.” It sounds like Ruth and Rocky are on the same wavelength.
We all think that we would like to marry someone who is our carbon copy, or at least very similar to us. If you think about it, though, how boring would that be? You would know exactly what the other person was thinking, and how s/he would react to each situation. It WOULD make decision-making easier, but how often does your spouse or significant other stop you from making a bad decision? That is mainly because the other person sees things differently.
I tend to be a realistic optimist. It is a combination of the personalities of both of my parents. My mother was the cheerleader, always telling her children that we could do whatever we set our minds to do. My father was an engineer. He spent all day, every day, thinking, “What is the worst thing that can happen in this situation?” I still do not regard him as a pessimist. I see him more as a realist. He did not say, “You can’t do this or that.’’ He merely asked how we WOULD do this or that. He then would point out the problems with our plan, and, sometimes, how to correct that problem.
I have brought up the term “realist” for a reason. People tend to think of optimists as not seeing problems. That is not the case. Someone who does not see problems in a situation is an idiot, not an optimist. The optimist sees the problems and tries to overcome them. A pessimist sees the problem and stops what he or she is doing. S/he sees the proverbial glass as half empty.
A realist, though, does not see the glass as half full or half empty. S/he sees something that needs to be done. That person goes and gets a pitcher and refills the proverbial glass. I try to be a realist, like my father. It leads to being taken advantage of by some who do not want to put forth any effort, but so be it. As long as I know that what I am doing is useful and helpful (not destructive), it is worth doing.
My analogy is this. Ninety percent of everything that happens to us in this life is negative. It is easy for one to see the bad things in life. That is not hard to do. The hard part is to look for and find the two to ten percent that IS positive and try to concentrate on it. THAT is making an “A” in the exam called “life.”
This has been d.c. scot, for Cal.E. Kat, with more food for thought.
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