The subject ACM-Art, Craft & Music was one of those subjects most pupils hated in primary school. And you cannot blame them. Here you were forced to like drawing, design, metalwork, woodwork, music, dances, musical instruments etc. even if your heart was in cooking or gardening. But we had to do it, and do it well for that matter in order to score impressive marks. Music was the better part because well, it brought some music to the not so popular subject. Art majorly dealt with drawings and paintings, and was my favorite, well, not because I used to score well but because I loved artistic stuff – murals, paintings, drawings, carvings, modeling etc. I guess I should have followed my heart and become an artist dealing with brushes and different paints, or do carving, or pottery instead of sitting behind the computer and crunching numbers to come up with budgets, and variances, and reconciliations, and journal entries, and reports, and projections, and.

In Art, you had to think well out of the ordinary in order to arrive at the correct answer. This required you sometimes get into the shoes of animals and insects. The teacher would draw a tree then ask you to give the bird’s eye view of the tree. It meant that you have to assume you are a bird, flying up there and come up with what the bird would see. But nowadays there is software to deal with that; to give you top elevation, front elevation, side elevation and any other elevation you might desire to see (hope that is correct). Bird’s eye view is what the bird sees when it looks at an object from above while worm’s eye view is what the worm sees when it looks at an object from below.

Based on the above, we can easily describe, and differentiate, to a great breadth, a pessimist and an optimist in life. And you will find these two personalities within your friends, family, colleagues, and classmates. Depending on how you look at it, one may uplift your spirits while the other may instill fear of the unknown and make you feel insecure, unworthy, hopeless – a sense of there being no future ahead.

A pessimist is a person who constantly or habitually sees or anticipates the worst. He is like the worm. When the worm looks up at a shrub, it sees this gigantic structure, this huge mega tree. I can just imagine what the worm thinks: “This is too huge; what do they call it? If I started climbing it, will I ever reach the leaves?” And so the pessimist will always discourage you from pursuing your dreams and aspirations. He will insist that it’s undoable, unachievable, out of your reach; too young to do this or that, that you need a godfather to cross that bridge – that bridge which separates you from the current miserable situation to self-fulfillment. He will always predict doom to all your experiments.

These are the guys who always expect the status quo to be maintained (at all costs). They lack adventure; they will rather have a boat stay on the shore for the whole of its lifetime than experience the waves and the tide. The pessimist will pamper a small problem to look like the world has just split into two, that it is unsolvable. He looks at the glass half empty (I had to use this cliché here). This is the kind of person you listen to with utmost care – you let his advice flow from one ear and out the other (immediately; figuratively speaking). Even when you achieve your goal, he will still have nasty words for you. He would rather see you fail – miserably for that matter – than appreciate the effort you have put into that which you do.

With an ‘it-can’t-be-done’ attitude, the pessimist would add no value to any development based discussion. And he suffers from CESB – Cumulative Effect of Small Brains (my college lecturer did not patent this so I have the liberty to use the expression here). That is the pessimist for you. Are you still discussing with him/her about your future plans?

An optimist is a person who expects the best and sees the best in all things. She is hopeful and confident that the future will be bright, that one day the tide will turn in her favor, that she will break through. Unlike the worm which sees an imposing object, she only sees it as a small/tiny object on the way. A bird sees the shrub described above as a tiny dot when it is up there. This is the kind of person to be with. She will encourage you throughout your journey and will enjoy seeing you succeed in whatever you do. And even if you fail, she will still be by your side, encouraging you to pick yourself up, dust yourself and move on.(By the way am using ‘she’ here for the sake of gender equality).     Unlike the pessimist, any problem she encounters is treated as a stumbling block, and as they say, it could as well be turned into a stepping stone in order to reach her destiny. She gives solutions to problems, or gives suggestions on how to evade/avoid problems as you journey in your dream. She sees the glass half full (again, sorry, I had to use this cliché here). This is the person who believes in the power of prayer, that with just some little faith, and as the Bible says even as tiny as the mustard seed, she could move mountains. She has the all-important ‘it-can-be-done’ attitude.

My opinion.