The Happy Wanderer III

[Barrett Dorko]

Hope is an emotion, a yearning, the experience of which is not entirely within our control. Optimism is a cognitive stance, a conscious expectation, which presumably anyone can develop through practice.

Barbara Ehrenreich

I spent three days at the APTA Convention and handed out about a hundred business cards. The conversations I had were almost without exception full of good will, plans for further connection and promises of more reading by those who were certain I no longer wrote. When my column landed in their lap each week twenty years ago everybody seemed to know me. When that stopped in ’95 most assumed I had died, I guess.

Little do they know.

Since I returned home two weeks ago I haven’t heard from anybody. For all I know, they aren’t reading this. Nothing new.

In the past few years several TV series have emphasized the significance of the first 48 hours following some incident requiring investigation - usually a murder. There’s even a TV show titled The First 48.

Well, we’re way past that now.

I’m hopeful because I’m human, but I’m not optimistic.

No wonder I’m more like Tony than I would prefer. At least I’ve never strangled anybody to death. Not actually.

When the profession turns toward realism I’ll feel as if I were part of it again. Until then, this quote from Ehrenreich will resound in my head:

In a world of positive thinking other people are not there to be nurtured or to provide unwelcome reality checks. They are there only to nourish, praise and affirm. Harsh as this dictum sounds, many ordinary people (read therapists) adopt it as their creed.

Sound like anyplace you might know?