Select Entry- Dana Mackenzie, Age 47

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.

Twenty years ago, when I used to live in North Carolina, I delivered meals once a week to home-bound people for the local Meals on Wheels program. I brought them lunch and a little bit of conversation, and they taught me about coping with adversity.

As a young man in good health, I could scarcely imagine living with the medical infirmities most of them endured on a daily basis--diabetes or blindness or arthritis. How must it feel to be forced to shuffle around the house at a snail's pace? I was accustomed to moving unencumbered everywhere I went. One of my favorite clients, Mrs. Bass, was so hunched over by osteoporosis that she spent most of her time looking at the floor. How, I wondered, could you live without being able to look up at the sky?

But another Meals on Wheels recipient, who was 91 years old, set me straight. "I may not be able to see too good," she declared, "and I may not be able to hear too good, and I may not be able to move too good, but there's no one happier than I am to be alive!"

Ever since then, I have thought often about her words. They have changed my view of optimism. A true optimist knows that bad things will happen, because adversity comes to everyone, sooner or later. But the optimist knows that he or she will endure, come what may. Optimism is a strength of spirit that has very little to do with external circumstances. You may not be able to look at the sky any more, but you can still know the sky in your heart.

Not everyone I delivered meals to was so upbeat. Now and then, I encountered someone who had given up hope, whose spirit had been broken by age or suffering. One woman, when I asked her how she was doing, would say in a toneless voice, "Oh, I'm nothing." She never explained what was wrong with her, but she showed no spark of interest in life. Such people broke my heart. They never lasted very long on my route, either because they died or

because they needed more care than Meals on Wheels could give them. The contrast between them and the optimists, the feisty never-give-uppers, could not have been more obvious. In the most extreme circumstances, you need hope

to stay alive. Hope gives life, and life gives hope.

Sometimes we call elderly people "shut-ins" when they live by themselves at home, but I find this word very misleading. Most of the people whom I have called optimists had support from somebody outside the home-the church, other family members, or a case worker. It's a lot easier to hope when you don't have to go it alone. No one could be less shut in than Mrs. Bass, who had known everyone in her neighborhood for years, and was always eager to show me pictures of her family and tell me about her past. She may have lived alone, but her house was full of caring.

Perhaps Mrs. Bass knew that I was the real shut-in, living alone and unattached in an adopted city, going out into the world but never really letting the world into my heart. That would explain why she was so happy when I told her that I was finally falling in love. I told her that my

girlfriend (how that word made me tingle!) had been born in Watts Hospital, where Mrs. Bass used to work. Maybe she had even seen Kay as a newborn infant.

I shared my good news with Mrs. Bass hesitantly, not sure whether she would even care about the personal affairs of somebody who was a half century younger. But she kept asking me for updates. When Kay and I got engaged,

Mrs. Bass asked me to bring her some skeins of white yarn. One morning a few months later, when I knocked on her door and gave her the hot lunch, she told me to wait a moment, because she had something for me. She went into her bedroom and brought out a beautiful white woolen blanket that she had knitted herself, her wedding present for Kay and me.

A few years later, adversity finally did catch up to us, not once but twice. Kay and I were not able to have children, and she cried bitter tears when she finally had to abandon this lifelong dream. But she moved past the tears and on to other dreams: a passion for quilting, her own business publishing quilt books.

Not long after we gave up on becoming parents, I lost my job as a mathematics professor and had to change careers. It was the impetus I needed to return to one of my childhood dreams, the dream of becoming a writer. We

moved to California--Kay's favorite state, even if she is a North Carolina native--and I went back to school for a year to study science writing.

The year that I studied writing was one of the happiest of my life, a year that seemed full of possibilities even though I was making no money. Twice a week I would ride my bicycle up the steep hill to campus, repeating a mantra

to help me reach the top: "I will not let the hill stop me, because I will let the hill teach me." In cycling, the hill teaches you when to push hard and when to conserve energy. The same hill that seems impossibly hard the

first time is ingrained in your muscles by the time you ride it the thirtieth time. As I repeated the mantra over and over, I thought about my new career as well. Whatever obstacles I might face, I was determined to learn from them, not to let them discourage me.

Eight years later, I am a professional science writer, and enjoy it much more than I enjoyed my previous career. I regularly have the privilege of interviewing the smartest people in the country and writing about their latest discoveries. I have been lucky enough to publish a book--another lifelong ambition, which probably would never have happened if I had stuck to my old career. None of it would have been possible without the encouragement and inspiration that I received from Kay.

All of these experiences-Meals on Wheels, my wife's story, my own-have made me an optimist, or at least an optimist-in-training. There are still some hills that scare me, but I haven't had to ride them yet.

Kay and I still keep Mrs. Bass's blanket in our linen closet. We never use it for sleeping, because it is too valuable. Every time I see the blanket,simple skeins of wool knitted into a work of beauty, it brings back to me

the same message of hope. Disappointments will happen. But as long as you have love, there is no mountain that you can't climb.