Being optimistic

Subject: Being optimistic 

As all the bodies organs slowly shut down and lose their effectiveness through ageing the brain still maintains its optimism. Of course in the sad case of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia there is an equally disastrous dissembling of faculties which are as traumatic as the heart or the lungs packing in but on the whole we die from other failings in our collective body apparatus, not from the brain giving up.

The optimism, planning for tomorrow, the emotions which have stayed with us in tact throughout our lives still function regardless. 

Running for the bus, as we used to, has an immediate response from the heart or lungs and they soon remind the brain they are not up to it. Anything to do with balance is suspect but the brain doesn't know yet as we take to the dance floor to re-enact an old romance stimulated by a tune from the past. It's only when we try to execute that pivot that we are brought short and flounder. Playing for the Dads against the boys in the school tournament, the young lad approaches with the ball at his feet, will he go left or right. It doesn't matter really since your reaction time is so slow you are constantly wrong footed.

And yet we continue to order books to give us purchase in understanding the world around us. We listen to programs with interest about the economy in 2020 or worry about the rate of global anything. We behave as if there is no tomorrow.

It's far better that way of course since pessimism about not being around, would be suicidal and the very beauty of optimism is that it is optimistic regarding all matters, even if reality will disprove the optimism.

The brain therefore ploughs on disregarding the facts. It was ever so of course since in its 'alter ego', the mind, it always lived in a bubble of its own making.
Casting around in a slurry of presumptions, it is besieged by romanticism, a calling for things gone by, of values no longer relevant. 

It lives in the surreal world of yesterday, trying to adapt to today, and frightened of tomorrow.