Honorable Mention - Kate Vega, Age 34

Welcome to our Optimistic Essay category. Here you will find the $1,000 winning contest essay, 5 finalist essays and 15 honorable mention essays and a growing list of hand-picked select essays that readers submitted during our "Why Are You Optimistic About the Future?" contest. This is a special category dedicated to those who took the time to share their touching stories and bright perspectives with HappyNews.com.

As I ponder the question before me, namely, why I am optimistic about the future, my knee jerk reaction is that I am happy about the future because I have one! I could also justify my happiness by sharing my observations of life and its beauty in raising my two young children, or I could appeal to my faith and rationalize that we are here for a reason and that the love of our creator is assurance enough that all will come out alright whether or not we understand what that might entail. But what keeps my head above water in these hard times, these cruel times, when nothing seems sacred anymore to anyone, is that the notion of "future" is open to interpretation, and that it has innumerable manifestations.

If my vision of the future were limited to this collective event in which the days before us unveil the progressive deterioration of civilization, a metaphysical place where a handful of powerful and careless leaders vie for ephemeral dominion over the earth and scare the living daylights out of the rest of us, then maybe I wouldn't be optimistic about the future. But within that construct are countless other futures. Mine is one of them. Yours is another. We must all remember that this gift of life is not contingent upon the capricious fluctuations of an artificial, myopic socio-political framework. Some of us know that our time left is short, and most of us are not quite sure what our expiration date will be. But whether you are a terminally ill patient under hospice care, or a hale and hearty newborn in the maternity ward, you have a future and it is free for you to enjoy. For most of us, it costs nothing other than the will to live.

But even if we all agreed that there is no one "future" and that there is little sense in mortifying ourselves with apocalyptic possibilities, some find the current state of affairs so hopeless that they would rather squelch their dreams than not see them realized. Life for many of us has become boring, predictable and empty. But is that the fault of life? Isn't a dissatisfaction with life due to how we are using it, or how we are perceiving it? It is the teasing out of time, and the mystery of that which life has yet to reveal that makes us human, and part of a magnificent act of creative generosity. None of the living are naturally deprived of the complexity and unpredictability of life. And while life presents us with much heartache and pain, it also metes out great joy and pleasure. The trick is to enjoy the good times while we have them, for the sad times are always bound to make a return. Time, like most everything else, is not to be enjoyed in quantity; it's all about the quality. It's never about how much time we have; rather it's a matter of appreciating and making the most of what we have now. I argue that it is important to invest in this life, and in this world, even if we suspect that something better is waiting once we move on. The realization of dreams is what makes the world a better place for all of us. Thus, I urge all of you love your life, and to make the passage of time, that collective experience of life in the year 2006 as productive and loving as possible. Even if I am tempted at times to succumb to a burgeoning panic in response to things like nuclear proliferation, child abuse, pollution and world hunger, I remind myself that the sun that shines through my window in the morning, the smiles on my children's faces and the stars in the sky tonight are mine to enjoy, and until they are taken away from me, or until I am taken away from them, they are great cause for celebration.