I have always been a short-term optimist, by nature. Whether that has a genetic element or comes from example, I cannot know. But I have always believed that more good things were likely to occur than bad. (This may have to do with my rather catholic tastes as to what constitutes "good.") It is a matter of being open to possibility and aware of serendipity's whisper. Everyone is invited to serendipity's picnic, but only a few bother to attend. Positive thinking? Are we headed toward platitudes? It's more than that. It's being willing to conspire with the physics of fate (chance, really) to harvest luck from happenstance.
      Jung called coincidence "synchronicity" and it happens to us all if we are only aware. Co-incidence--happening with. You must be ready to see it and do more than say "wow" when you do. To pluck a plum when you pass beneath the bough, you've got to be looking up. To catch the glisten of the green snail beneath the plum tree, you must regard the ground. To capture more good than bad, you scan the whole and, mantis like, snatch the happy moment before it springs away, out of reach.
      I am not a fatalist, and when some great coincidence brings me joy I try not to say it was "meant to happen." Strings of bad "luck" do sometimes befall people, even those who watch for the good. My brother has had a lifelong run of bad breaks, more than his share, while I feel I've had more than my fair share of good ones. Stochastically (a word I learned to toss around in graduate school that means "chances are") one is as likely to be felled by lightning as lifted by the lottery. Life is a lottery. But somehow, seekers after something often seem to get better breaks than others who fail to look around. Or do they simply find more compensations?
      Of course, another reason for short-term optimism lies in our ability to apply will and thought and action to effect change in our time. We can create a nature reserve and enjoy it for the rest of our lives. We can vote the bums out. We can live selectively, choosing that which we wish to experience. And there are, after all, far too many pleasures available to be able to sample them all: too many wild and intriguing places to ever visit people to meet, birds to watch, symphonies to hear, and so on. The riches embarrass our poor abi]ity to enjoy them. Pessimism in the short term is its own punishment, since it vitiates the will and makes one a pawn of circumstance.
-       Robert Michael Pyle, Wintergreen: Listening to the Land's Heart