There I was, parking three kilometres away from my daughter’s swimming gala because obviously all the good spots would be taken, so what’s the point of looking for parking closer?

But when I made the trek back to the car after the gala, I was not quite the hardcore pessimist I was when I arrived.

I can’t pinpoint the moment the change happened.

For a long time, there was nothing in my glass; nothing but gloom. I was channelling my inner Eeyore, always expecting the worst.

That way, I figured, I wouldn’t be disappointed when the worst happened. And should the best happen, which of course it wouldn’t, well then, that would be a nice surprise.

Being a pessimist keeps you in a frozen state.

Here’s an incident from my youth that sums up the pessimist’s Catch-22.

I bought a raffle ticket at a school fete to win a massive jar of jelly beans.

There was only one snag: if your ticket was drawn, you had to be at the fete to claim your prize. If I waited for the draw, I’d miss my favourite programme, The A-Team.

Our family didn’t have a video recorder, and this was in the days before streaming.

As a natural-born pessimist, I knew that if I went home, my ticket would be drawn.

I also knew that if I waited for the draw, my ticket wouldn’t be drawn, and I would miss the A-Team. What was a pessimist to do?

I can’t pinpoint my moment of transformation, but I can recall two incidents that propelled me out of full-blown pessimism.

The first was at that same swimming gala. I was sitting in the stands watching race after race.

My daughter’s event was the second-last race, and the tedium was, well, tedious.

And then a girl about 7-years-old came galloping to her mom, who was near me.

The girl was hopping from one foot to the next; she could hardly contain herself. “Mom! Mom! Mom!” she squealed.

 “Judith came second!” The girl was now dancing and chanting, “Judith came second, Judith came second.”

A few moments later, a girl a few years older plodded into view.

“Well done, Judith,” said the mother. “Ruth said you came second.”

Judith scowled. “I lost. There were only two of us in the race”.

“No,” little Ruth persisted, “You didn’t lose. You came second.”

My pessimist heart started to melt. What a beautiful way to see the world, I thought.

Reframing “last” as “second” creates space for joy and participation rather than defeat.

It’s a tiny shift in perspective, but it opens up a world of possibilities.

The second incident was hearing Victor Vermuelen’s wise words: “Don’t be unhappy with what you haven’t got; be happy with what you have got.”

Victor, left a quadriplegic after a tragic swimming pool accident, is the epitome of optimism – for him, the glass isn’t half empty or half full, it is completely full…of opportunity.

Over the years, I have gradually metamorphosed from a full-blown pessimist to…well, let’s just say not a total pessimist: I’m a work in progress.

You see, although I want to look at the glass through rose-tinted glasses, I still doom-scroll through the news, and I can’t shake the feeling that we are racing towards armageddon.

I know there is global warming, climate change, turtles choking on plastic straws, wildfires, floods, tsunamis, increasing violence against women and children, racism, xenophobia, murders, wars, and never-ending cycles of tit-for-tat conflict.

But despite all of this, I still believe everything will be alright.

I suppose I am pessimistically optimistic or optimistically pessimistic. Or maybe I am just a recovering pessimist.

We can look at harsh realities from a pessimist’s perspective and believe we can’t do anything about them, which makes us feel helpless and makes us believe that we can’t act.

Or we can choose to look at it from an optimist’s perspective. Optimists don’t ignore reality; they acknowledge the difficulties but refuse to surrender to them.

Where pessimists see problems, optimists choose to see potential.

Being an optimist may seem naive — but only if you believe that coming second in a two-person race means you’ve lost.