Most of All They Taught Me Happiness By Robert Muller
Selected Quotes and Related Comments
By Vicky Rossi
#8 Quotation from the chapter entitled “How to Deal with Pessimists”, volume 5 “Lessons from the United Nations":
"When I arrived at my office I found an Indian lady waiting for me: Mrs Nigam, the president of the Federation of United Nations Associations of India. Her cheerful face was a blessing to me. Pursuing my train of thought, I asked her point-blank:
'Mrs. Nigam, are you a pessimist?'
'For heaven's sake, no! God forbid! Pessimists are second-rate people. They do not believe in life. (...) All they want is to drag you down and appease their own feelings of mediocrity and fear. (...) I have found a simple and effective way to cope with them:
I cut them right in the middle of their litanies and give them work to do. Either they leave or they work. Keep pessimists away from you or make them work, and they will not bother you.'
(...) This was a wise comment indeed. The worst thing a good person can do is to join the sad cohort of pessimists, and the next worst is to engage in a dialogue with them."
My related comments:
Choosing our company well is as important to our physical, emotional and mental health as feeding ourselves appropriately and living/working in a healthy environment. If we regularly eat food with a poor nutritional value, we will soon find ourselves in a bad state of health. The same is true of the "spiritual food" which we choose to ingest: the music we listen to, the books we read, the programmes we watch – all are susceptible to impacting in a positive or negative way our emotional and mental states. If we choose to surround ourselves with pessimistic persons, equally, the glass will very quickly look half empty and will make our creative potential much more difficult to tap into. Furthermore, we will often feel a sense of being "drained" as the pessimist saps our vibrant energy to fill the empty "hole" caused by their gloom. This brings to mind the responsibility each one of us has to be aware of our moods and the effects our moods can have on others.
Interestingly, when we feel optimistic and have positive thoughts, it is reflected in our physical body – we automatically assume a more upright posture with our heads held high. When we experience a sense of pessimism, our bodies quickly sag into a droopy posture and our eyes will tend to look downwards towards the ground.
Could it be that the reverse is also true, namely that by adjusting our physical posture we can affect a change in our mood and outlook?
