#on optimism

existing, despite it all

what’s some good advice you want to share?

For the ask game!!

This ask game

Hello my internet witch I hope you're well :)

SO.

My most recent lesson is that you’re going to be unpalatable for some people and it’s not something you can change people’s minds about or work on.

Sometimes things just don’t align, and it’s not always going to be obvious from the get go, and you’re going to have a lot of hope and then it’s going to be crushed and you need to be gentle with yourself.

Just because you’re not loved by everyone doesn’t mean you’re not valuable, or not worthy of love. I think it’s hard to not assimilate a rejection as a “no one loves me I’m rotten I’m awful I’m a nightmare I’m no good”, reassessing everything you’ve ever done and wondering ififififif then maybe this or ifififif I’d been more palatable then maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

But this isn’t super productive? It’s good to reflect and give credit where credit’s due, you’re not always going to do good things only, and figuring out how to not do that is smart, but spiralling into madness isn’t great for your own mental health either?

And I don’t really know how to avoid this, I think it’ll happen and when it happens it’ll be shit, and you’ll eat ice cream and call your friends and ask if you’re a horrible human, and they’ll say sometimes but we love you either way, you’ll cry a lot and then try to do better for the next round.

The worst thing you can do is become jaded?

I’m a forever optimistic person. I forever hope that I’ll be understood and loved, and it doesn’t always work but when it does it’s so worth it, and I would have hated to deprive myself from this love just because some people thought I was hurtful or not worth their time.

Not everyone will think you’re a good person, and this doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.

Nor everyone is capable of being forever optimistic, but it’s what I hope for everyone anyway. Optimism has gotten me into trouble, but it’s also brought me a lot of happiness.

ISSUE #219 / JANUARY 2023

What is joy? Where is it? Where is love in this world that is such an evil mess.

MAJA, LONDON, UK

Are you an optimist?

GIL, RIO, BRAZIL

Who is your favourite cartoonist?

ALAN, OXFORD, UK

Do you like Leonard Cohen?

LEON, MONTREAL, CANADA

Dear Maja, Gil, Alan, and Leon,

If we do not attend to the work of projecting delight upon the world, what are we actually doing? If we do not look for joy, search for it, reach deep for it, what are we saying about the world? Are we saying that malevolence is the routine stuff of life, that oppression and corruption and degradation is the very matter of the world? That we greet each day with suspicion, bitterness and contempt? It seems to me that to make suffering the focus of our attention, to pay witness only to the malevolence of the world, is to be in service to the devil himself.

Is the world heading for disaster? I suppose so. We are constantly, relentlessly, told as much. Am I hopeful for its future? Well, yes, I am. I choose to be an optimist through a kind of necessity, because from my experience pessimism is a corrosive and damaging position to take – one that casts its shadow over all things, causing a kind of societal sickness, a contaminant that ultimately amplifies and glorifies the problems it professes to abhor.

For me, to strive toward joy has become a calling and a practise. It is carried out with the full understanding of the terms of this hallowed and harrowed world. I pursue it with an awareness that joy exists both in the worst of the world and within the best, and that joy, flighty, jumpy, startling thing that it is, often finds its true voice within its opposite. Joy sings small, bright songs in the dark — these moments, so easily disregarded, so quickly dismissed, are the radiant points of light that pierce the gloom to give validation to the world. That’s how the light gets in, Leonard Cohen tells us, whilst casting his genius and delight forever among the cosmos.

But no one understands joy like the Australian cartoonist, Michael Leunig. In his classic cartoon, ‘Gee Dad, you’re fantastic!’, a father plays his ukulele to the delight of his family, picnicking in a beam of light that cuts though an utterly devastated landscape. I can’t think of a work of art that more poignantly articulates the utter and urgent need for the pursuit of joy. Maja, joy exists as a bright, insistent spasm of defiance within the darkness of the world. Seek it. It is there.

The Red Hand Files

ISSUE #176 / DECEMBER 2021

I'm sixteen and have just recently gotten really into your work. I was wondering: what advice would you give to your sixteen year old self and why?

TAYA, LOWER SACKVILLE, CANADA

Dear Taya,

This is an excellent question and I am often asked it, but I find it a very difficult question to answer.

The difficulty is that I am, in fact, my sixteen-year-old self, just half a century older. Not only that but, sitting here at the kitchen table, with the sun streaming through the window, answering your excellent question, my older self, the current destination of my younger self, is mostly happy.

However, my older self is protective and instinctively wants to warn my sixteen-year-old self not to make the mistakes that I know from experience are going to cause him pain. But, you see, this older and more experienced self also knows that the painful things are often the things that ultimately give substance and meaning to life. My older self knows that life’s mistakes are destiny’s way of laying the tracks that will bring my younger self to the place where I am at this very moment — the mostly happy place, where I sit, with the sun coming through the window, writing an answer to your excellent question.

Have a great life, Taya, it’s all ahead of you.