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Optimism

After a week where we Proud East Marshians showed and felt the real power of our community in solidarity, I wanted to share this passage from the book ‘The Future We Choose’ by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac about the importance of remaining optimistic and nurturing optimism.

“Optimism empowers you; it drives your desire to engage, to contribute, to make a difference. It makes you jump out of bed in the morning because you feel challenged and hopeful at the same time. It calls to that which is emerging and makes you want to be an active part of change. Rebecca Solnit puts it well: ‘Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency; … hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and the marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable’.

In other words, optimism is the force that enables you to create a new reality.

Optimism is not the result of achieving a task we have set for ourselves. That is a celebration. Optimism is the necessary input to meeting a challenge.

Optimism is about having steadfast confidence in our ability to solve big challenges. It is about making the choice to tenaciously work to make the current reality better.

Optimism is about actively proving, through every decision and every action, that we are capable of designing a better future.’