A poem on the beauty of looking on the bright side, by Alexander McCall Smith

Optimism

All wise parents teach their young
Sayings that sound a weather warning:
A red sky at night, we all recall,
Is the shepherd’s delight; in the morning
It is of course the sailor’s warning;
We are taught that truth at six.
Remember it at sixty, line for line,
A sort of creed for those of us
Who like to talk about the weather.

There are others, though, who do not
Observe these familiar sayings,
And take another view; for them
A mackerel sky is not a sign
Of unsettled weather in the offing;
Clouds, they say, know nothing
About the weather, or anything else;
A mackerel sky is just pretty stripes,
Like the fish itself, so strikingly beautiful
When you glimpse it freshly caught,
Silver-green, sleek, striped like a sea tiger.
Such doubters of conventional warnings
Should not be seen as in any way misguided:
They simply take the sanguine view
That things will be better than predicted
In the solemn observations of others.

And so often they are right:
The world in the evening may seem
A hopeless place, full of conflict
And all the various disappointments,
But in the morning, the rising sun
Dispels the pessimism of dark thoughts,
Reminds us of the beauty of the world
Its sheer resilience, helping us,
Hopeful humanity that we are,
To get along somehow – to persist.

A map may identify the well-marked dangers,
Cliffs over which we may well fall,
Bogs in which it is only too easy
To become immersed, and sink,
But we might raise our eyes and gaze instead
On sunlit uplands of healing friendship.
And of comity, and most of all, of love,
A metaphorical landscape that makes
Us all feel a whole lot better,
Optimism being a potent medicine
Readily available, without prescription.

The optimist, then, is a realist of sorts,
Is happier, by far, sleeps better at night,
Believes that things will turn out well,
And makes that happen – that’s the thing:
The self-fulfilling prophecy has a habit
Of being proved right; fear of risk
Makes risk happen; a belief in buoyancy
Sometimes brings the sinking swimmer
To the shore: to a place he thought
He might just reach, and has.

This poem is taken from The Kind Company of Others (Polygon, £12.99) by Alexander McCall Smith, with illustrations by Iain McIntosh. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

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