“Worry is a bully,” said one of my friends yesterday. “Worry is the thief of today’s joy.”

He’s right, yet I cannot stop worrying. Just general worries. I worry about the big things, like the possibility of being widowed – which, seeing as my husband’s father lived until he was 94, is an event unlikely to happen for a number of years. I do, however, especially worry about him riding his motorbike. I worry about the little things, like getting to work on time, which is why I often clock in twenty minutes before my shift. I worry about being late for trains or flights and always arrive in lots of time. They say that the only guaranteed way to catch your train is to just miss the one before – and that’s me. I worry about my children’s exam results more than they do themselves. I sometimes worry about what other people think – especially other drivers when I make a mistake on the road. I am a natural worrier.

My husband is a natural optimist. If one of our girls is out late at night, he will be sleeping peacefully beside me, while I lie awake until they are safely home – even if that’s at 3am! He prefers to believe that everything will work out all right, even when that means burying his head in the sand. When I was very ill, it was my younger daughter who came home from school early to persuade me to go to A&E. I had no idea how ill I was – until I woke up to find myself on a drip and having a blood transfusion! My husband preferred to think I would just get better by myself.

They say that optimists and pessimists are both right about fifty percent of the time, but that optimists have a far better time of it, and I think that’s right. I know that the worst things that have happened never occurred to me, like a close friend being arrested on a charge of child sex abuse – and that charge being upheld in court. It never occurred to me, forty years ago, that I would be divorced ten years later. But equally, it never occurred to me that I would be happily remarried and have my wonderful children.

We can plan for those things we can foresee, even if those plans are nebulous and just mental notes, but the worst things often happen out of the blue or at the time we’re least expecting them. As Monty Python famously said, no-one expects the (terrible) Spanish Inquisition!

So, is it better to be an optimist or a pessimist? Is it better to plan for every conceivable event – and still miss the unexpected – or to blithely tread through life, just dealing with things when they come along? Do optimists deny reality and do pessimists deny themselves joy?

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? And would you change if you could?

Mary

A Moodscope member