Okay, I will confess, “Miracle on 34th Street” is one of my all-time favorite movies. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is Natalie Wood in the backseat of the car, saying “I believe, I believe, it’s silly but I believe…”
Like many people, for an awfully long time I always thought of the meaning of Christmas as “finally getting what you want.” But now I understand, that’s just the end result of the process. The process itself, not the thing received, is the real meaning of Christmas.
The “process” is about having the belief/faith/trust that good things will happen. While we associate it with the birth of Jesus, this isn’t a purely “religious” idea. It’s more of a philosophy of life. It’s about maintaining that positive outlook in the face of facts that can easily lead you to think otherwise.
I came to this epiphany in a rather roundabout fashion. In writing my “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid” book, I observed that rich kids don’t just have more cash. They consistently have much more trust and faith than poor kids do. Rich kids don’t get everything that they want, but their higher level of trust and optimism gives them a huge statistical advantage in the process. It is easy to dismiss this and say they are more optimistic because they have money in the first place, but I say, it’s very hard to tell which came first, the goose or the golden egg.
Of course, it’s hard to maintain optimism. There are all sorts of things in our world that attack and corrode our sense of trust. Growing up poor is a nonstop process in trust corrosion. And, sad to say, we are all exposed to relentless “poor kid” training, in our being inundated with reports of crime, violence, natural disasters, and corruption on a daily basis. And this recent tragedy in Newtown Connecticut is just the latest in a long series.
If your trust violations come too fast or too hard, it’s easy to simply say, “I will never trust anything again,” in order to save yourself the disappointment of going from being optimistic to being disappointed. This is “poor kid” training. But no matter how bad things seem to get, I have learned there is always something good in life as well, and sometimes recovering from the bad things are the only way we can discover these good things.
Granted, this is a highly imperfect world, we will never achieve perfection in it. But this invisible process, of doggedly maintaining our core optimism that good things will happen even though bad things often happen, is key, not just to religious belief, but to any sensible philosophy as well as to your financial well-being.
There are many people who, for whatever reason, have sunken into the dark side of life, where they have become totally antagonistic to the world outside as well as the world within themselves. For the world to make sense to them, they expect bad things to happen. The only reason they make money is to protect themselves from those bad things. This is actually a fairly logical perspective, and is is a way that many people choose to deal with the pain and imperfection of life.
Sadly, some people become so sunken into this dark side of life, and so totally disconnected, that they become eager to proselytize their philosophy by doing things that are designed to shatter everyone else’s fragile sense of optimism and trust in other people. Misery loves company, and to get company, what better way than to make other people just as miserable as you?
And so now I see that all these famous Christmas stories are not about the thing gotten at the end. They are really about people regaining a sense of trust and optimism, and how that is key to getting the “thing” we really want, which isn’t a “thing” at all, but a state of connectedness. Whether it is Ebenezer Scrooge or Natalie Wood, it’s about seeing past the pain of past injuries and willing to embrace optimism for the future “even though common sense tells you not to.”
We will never rid ourselves of manifestations of fear or people who have gotten lost in it. But for life to have any real meaning at all, we have to keep trying. As Natalie Wood said, “I believe, I believe, it’s silly, but I believe.”
© Justin Locke
