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‘NO EARLIER than’ is not a phrase to stir the soul, yet during this past week it has buoyed my spirits.
I had been stuck in a moment, but now there is a hopeful road map and timetable — key tools for someone who loves to plan ahead.
That my kids will be reunited with schoolmates; that I might hope to get my highlights done before May Day. Well, I’ll take the crumbs of ‘no earlier than’ over nothing at all.
Spurred by the novel idea that in the not-too-distant future I might have a social life beyond Zoom, I ran harder and faster last week and took the children out cycling. The skies were blue, the breeze gentle; in flower beds, narcissi and crocuses pushed up towards the sun. My husband brought home daffodils.
It is sometimes hard to hold on to hope. But those who can do so are happier people, and a cheerful disposition is something we are encouraged to seek in others. Yet we love a cynic, too — which is why two of literature’s pin-up positivists have also become bywords for foolhardy optimism.
Dr Pangloss, the tutor of Voltaire’s Candide, teaches his young charge that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. His philosophy is put to the test when Candide experiences one misfortune after another. Pangloss inspires the term Panglossian.
As a girl I loved Eleanor H. Porter’s children’s classic Pollyanna, so I have always thought it mean, as an adult, that her name should have become snarky shorthand for a kind of naive, cock-eyed optimism.
Pollyanna is an orphan, schooled by her late father to find the upside of any situation. When her positivism deserts her after an accident, the townspeople she has helped rally to support her.
Louisa Clark, the much-loved heroine of Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You, is employed as a carer for Will Traynor — quadriplegic after an accident — because his parents hope she might bring some sunshine back into his life. She does, though the story does not end there.
And nor will ours for the foreseeable, so I won’t say things can only get better — but that they should.