RAISE A GLASS
It’s wise to be aware of how we’re looking the world. The “glass” through which we view it.
We’re always gazing in and out through windows — sometimes through beautiful stained glass, other times through fingerprint smears and grime. Many of us wear eyeglasses to adjust our vision, or sunglasses to dim it. Prisms and kaleidoscopes can make what we’re looking at appear magical, distorting it, or revealing something deeper perhaps.
Less obvious, usually, are all the psychological lenses we’re wearing. Our cultural biases and personal prejudice. Assumptions born of experience. Disappointments, aspirations, hard-earned lessons, wisdom.
Even when we we’re trying to be clear-eyed — we might think we’re objective and wide open to possibility — our outlook (and in-look) inevitably are colored by what we’ve seen and known before. We can’t avoid it entirely.
We can be mindful of it, though. And try to take responsibility for that which we are bringing to everything we encounter. Then, we can be intentional. And practice “raising” our glasses — on purpose — to better see what our souls truly are looking for.
I’ve got stacks of books teetering on and around my bedside table. Excellent works of nonfiction on a variety of fascinating subjects that put me right to sleep. Most of them, I’ve only read a few pages.
Different volumes rise to the top of the piles from time to time, getting reshuffled after I’ve knocked them over or, more rarely, swept and dusted. This happened not too long ago. And I was delighted to notice afresh a book I’d utterly forgotten — Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. So far, I’ve only read the prologue and first chapter, so it’s premature for me to report on it. But the beginning touched me deeply, and honestly it might be months or years before I make it to chapter 2, so I won’t wait…
Bregman dismantles the persistent myth that humans generally are selfish and aggressive. He argues that during times of crisis, most people actually behave with great kindness and generosity.
The media, the military, and the market all have promoted and benefitted from the idea that individuals and societies will devolve into pandemonium at the first whiff of danger or lack. Religion and spirituality have worked this angle, plenty, too — the premise there’s something about human being that needs fixing, saving, transcendence, evolution, self-help, and prayer in order to reach its potential/perfection.
But this conventional wisdom — that civilization teeters constantly on the brink of something out of “Lord of the Flies” — is not only a pathway to despair, IT IS ALSO ENTIRELY INACCURATE. It is not at all, in fact, how we have behaved during times of war, nor in the wake of natural disasters. It’s neither who we are in tight-knit communities, nor with perfect strangers.
Images of holiday shoppers trampling each other to buy discounted electronics may make for rousing tv infotainment, but it’s not an accurate depiction of how we behave when it really matters. Sure, we can point to miserable examples of toilet-paper hoarders, disaster profiteers, looters, and price gougers. But the amount of media attention on these scenarios notwithstanding, these are exceptions to humanity’s heart, not its rule.
With real examples and data from different countries and cultures, spanning a range of socioeconomic conditions, Bergman illustrates that our true nature is decency, compassion, good-humor, cooperation, courage, and care for each other.
Chapter One of Humankind: A Hopeful History is so very beautiful that I’m going to do my darnedest to read the whole thing.
I also love it as a call to optimism. And a justification of optimism. I feel vindicated, because I’ve been accused of wearing rose-colored glasses for most of my life.
Many (maybe most) of my nearest and dearest are pessimists. Not just my family of origin, but also my chosen loved ones. Philosophically, gloom and despair are against everything I stand for. But I’m drawn to it, apparently. Like a moth to the flame of cynicism, sarcasm, and the bleakest, darkest humor. Maybe it’s generational. Or maybe it’s because after diving wing-first into incinerating bitterness — my own and others’ — I get to rise from those ashes and experience the subsequent satisfaction of redemption and hope.
That’s how it feels to me anyway. To my loved ones, I’m sure it just sounds like a flip-flop into annoying Pollyanna-ism.
My brother once growled at me, when I was trying to look on the bright side of something, “Oh sure! That’s great advice, An-drew. Let’s all get out our crystals and skip merrily down the yellow brick road into Candy Land under a rainbow of self-delusion!” (I’m trying to convey his sneer with italics. You can imagine it, right?)
The thing is — I totally get where he’s coming from. And I’m right there with him if we’re calling out spiritual bypass and willful ignorance, the disregard of inconvenient truths and the denial of factual reality. Happy-ending, silver-lining spins are both ineffective and insulting if they mean ignoring someone’s suffering or diminishing someone’s hardship. We don’t get to skim blithely over the parts of life we don’t like.
AND… If I have to choose a bias one way or another, I’d rather wear rose-colored glasses than shit-spattered ones any day.
The point of wearing any glasses at all is to be able to view as clearly as possible. But clarity doesn’t necessarily mean impartiality. Vision always involves interpretation.
Indeed, our eyes don’t really “see” anything; our eyes merely transmit information. Our brains decode this information, giving it meaning and significance relative to whatever story we’re telling about our life and the world. And this world is a busy place, with trillions of bits of data coming at us from every direction all the time.
So it seems to me really useful to be able to put on some intentional glasses — call them rose-colored or mindful — just to help us distinguish what’s factual from the blur of cultural conversations, the filters of our own experience and media bubbles, and an evolutionary bias towards negativity.
Some of this is pretty basic power-of-positive-thinking stuff. But I’m not suggesting positivity as a distortion of reality. It can be more like: wearing corrective lenses. Since most of us are myopic in our partiality to bad news, deliberate optimism and hope can help us to better see what’s soulful and true.
Because when we start looking for the world we want, the lives we want — rather than focusing only on everything that appears to be in the way — we do find all sorts of encouraging evidence and hopeful examples. And then we can share what we see with others, and start having powerful, courageous, and creative conversations about it. Hopefully, we can better discern our actual problems from all the dramatizing and self-defeating baloney. We can celebrate and maximize our own astonishing gifts. And we can collaborate with each other in a context of collective brilliance, ingenuity, and humanity’s essential goodness.
Friends, that’s the world in which I want to live. It’s the world I want to see, so I’m gonna to look for it. Even when we’re falling short, even when my heart is broken and it seems easier to be bitter. I choose it, because in my heart of hearts I believe that it’s not just possible, it’s inevitable if we commit to creating it together.
I can’t wait to be with you this Sunday, July 12, 10:00am at q-Staff Theatre. With the divine Patty Stephens. XO, Drew
©2026 Drew Groves
