Optimist vs Pessimist

So I had to stop in the middle of my story yesterday because I thought I would run my theory by my mother.  The next thing I knew we were transported to her youth and how she felt about being glad or unhappy.  The conversation took the usual circuitous route and ended up in several gopher holes before we got back to whether or not she thought people were either an optimist or a pessimist by nature, not by life.

      The conversation went something like this.

      “So do you think you were happy as a child despite growing up in an occupied country?”

      “I never thought about being happy.  Everything was just normal and we were all happy.  My parents were happy with each other and so were my aunts and uncles.”

      “But were they happy in themselves, not with each other”  I patiently asked.

      “There wasn’t all this divorce going on.   People married because they liked each other and didn’t just pick the first person they who asked them, thinking they could change out later if it didn’t work out.”

      “But my question is, were they happy in themselves?”

      Long pause, thinking in progress.

      “They were happy because they liked each other.”

      Now I had to think about how to get her out of this gopher hole.

      “Would you say you were happy-go-lucky rather than someone who worried about every little thing in case it would go wrong?”

      “I wouldn’t say that I was happy or thought about it at all.  I just didn’t worry.  But I was responsible.  I was always careful about not getting into trouble or breaking a leg.”

      From there the conversation drifted to her confirmation and how her self confidence grew when her father told her she was the nicest girl in the class, with the nicest dress.  Afterwards she was walking ahead of some boys from her school and she overheard them say that she was the nicest once at the confirmation.  Somehow in all of this I gathered that self confidence was part of her happiness.