Positive Attitudes, Winner or Loser

What is it about hoping for something good that scares us? We hold back from picturing a bright outcome because we assume the fall will hurt worse if the thing falls apart. Better to expect little, we tell ourselves, and skip the letdown.

Think about how you built whole worlds in your head as a kid. Nothing fenced you in except how far your imagination could reach. I remember being convinced that the president and his family owned every object a person might wish for, plus a pile of things nobody else could get. In my young mind they had color televisions sitting in their rooms before those sets had even been manufactured.

A friend of mine and I used to design gowns together, not on paper but in our heads, and we could see them down to the stitching. Call it daydreaming if you want. The candy we imagined still tasted sweet. And every real thing out in the world began as somebody's idea first, before it took on weight and shape.

The mood you carry shapes what you walk into. Notice the difference in how you move when you're certain something is coming to you, versus how you shrink when you've already decided the deck is stacked, that fairness is a joke, that no amount of effort on your part will tip the odds.

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