The optimist between.
The Blessed Curse.
Tumbleweed Diaries · Warrior Series
The Optimist
Between
An Awakening
May 2026 · Arvid Paul Croonquist
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Iwoke up this morning knowing something on a deeper level than I ever have before: I have to be the optimist. The optimist between my yesterday and my tomorrow. What a beautiful thing to realize. What a magical mantra to carry through life.
That statement fills my heart with joy — and it fills it with something tender, too. Because for a long stretch of my life, all I did in that in-between space was pessimism. My past was never enough, and my future was never enough. I lived as a pessimist. What an interesting egoic choice that turned out to be.
“It turns out the historical, evolutionary, spiritual soul can only be an optimist. It’s evolution’s law. That way, even if it turns out wrong — it was right.”
Think about that. In between the first splitting cells of this thing I call my life, there was optimism. Among the two cells. It wasn’t until I was fully formed and my mother gave birth to me that the question arose: Would I remain the optimist between each breath? Between each yesterday and each tomorrow? Or would the pessimistic voice — the one that says nothing’s ever enough — take over?
Only a true optimist can reconcile that pessimistic path. Overcome all the separation and sadness it created. Only an optimist who chooses happiness in the moment over the delusional day-after or the day-before.
The Stack
I came across some interesting information about self this morning. It turns out that when I’m reflecting on my experience, the ego likes left turns — and the spiritual self makes the right turns that add up to my now.
I don’t know what all of it means yet, or how it fully plays out. But I’m having a very interesting conceptual awareness around my learning disabilities and the role they’ve played in my pessimist life. I have several of them — a stack, a suite. And as I sit in the now of optimism, writing these stories to try to help others, something like an awakening is happening. A powerful shift in how I think, and how these conditions stack into my reality.
A language-processing disorder that made it very dangerous to ever put anything down on paper. Words and thoughts would swim around in my head and not make sense. I couldn’t risk the consequences of being discovered. So I never wrote anything down.
A comorbidity where my hands betray my mind. When I do try to put something down — to archive a thought or a feeling, to write a love letter or a card — something breaks between intention and execution.
A condition where a person cannot voluntarily create mental images in their mind. When asked to “picture” something — a beach, a loved one’s face, an apple — I don’t see anything visually in my imagination. Nothing. Just the back of my eyelids.
The absence of an inner monologue and inner sound. While many people have a constant internal voice narrating their thoughts, or can mentally hear music playing in their heads, I experience silence. No inner soundtrack. No voice reading these words back to me as I compose them. My inner world is neither visual nor auditory. It is something else entirely — felt, not seen or heard.
Liability or Gift?
So as I slept, and when I woke, I started to ponder: Is this a liability or a gift?
It’s a total liability if I dwell in the life of a pessimist — where the ego is in charge and nothing’s ever enough. Then this stack is just more fodder for a battle with no ending. But as I sat in meditation this morning, surveying the landscape of my heart, my mind, my soul, my past and my future through the eyes of the optimist, with people around me struggling with real problems — life and death — something occurred to me.
“This particular combination of attributes that some people might call learning disabilities — might be my greatest asset.”
Maybe this experience I call my life, lived through these conditions, which directly affect my ability to interpret yesterday and to ponder and dream about tomorrow — maybe it’s a gift. I can’t write down my past or visualize it. I can’t recall a song, or a movie, or the face of a love. So it is all fiction to me. Conceptual. I can never tell a truly accurate story about yesterday.
Is that a liability or an asset? Is the story about yesterday ever really true? Is the story about tomorrow anything but fiction? Am I not blessed — not out of virtue, but just by my wiring — to live life as one conceptual interpretation of the now?
Is it why it’s so easy for me to write about the truth? Because with these conditions, I have no other option but to live in a sort of truth?
Hardwired
Was all of my pessimistic suffering for sixty-plus years just my ego telling me how wrong or right it was? My ego firing off stories about how dyslexia made me less of a man. How my dysgraphia would be perceived if someone ever saw me try to write. How the blank screen behind my closed eyes made me incomplete. How the silence inside my head meant something was missing.
I can’t remember the lyrics to any song. Not even Jingle Bells. When I look at somebody, my inner voice struggles to speak their name or remember how we met. So every time is sort of like the first time. Nobody has ever really wounded me deeply from the past, or scared me deeply with the future, because I have no real concept of who they were yesterday or who they’ll be tomorrow. I can’t rely on stories, visual evidence, audio evidence. It’s all fiction to me.
“It turns out I’ve been hardwired by the divine to be the optimist. I have no other choice.”
My authentic natural self is hardwired for love. And anything that is not love turns out to be fiction — something not really true — because I genuinely don’t know how to write it down, how to hold it in an image, how to hear it in my head. There is no affidavit in my life. My hand is incapable of documenting the past or the future. It just doesn’t work that way.
As I close my eyes, I just see the back of my eyelids. Is that a blessing or a curse? There is no soundtrack to the past, no song of the future. There is just the beautiful rhythm and melody as I sit in my destiny — which is to be optimistic about what’s going to happen next.
I just have to be super happy between breaths.
Even if the next one is my last.
Is that a liability?
Or a blessing.
— Arvid Paul Croonquist · The Tumbleweed Diaries
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