O is for Optimism

From the memoirs of Billie Harper, looking back on her learning journey.

We didn’t rebuild the world on certainty. We rebuilt it on faith—and optimism.

That kind of optimism wasn’t naïve. It wasn’t all sunshine and slogans. This kind of optimism was gritty, steady, and deeply practical. You could see it in the way people showed up for one another—even after the worst had happened. It grew in gardens planted while the soil was still healing, and in schools reopened with salvaged books, hope stitched quietly between the pages.

Our ancestral journals are full of these moments. Not declarations, but choices. A woman collecting seeds from flood-damaged ground. A teenager teaching elders how to use solar tools. Small, ordinary actions, grounded in the belief that something better was still possible.

My mum used to say, “Optimism is a discipline.” She believed it had to be practiced—like listening, like tending. And she was right. In the early days of the healing, people didn’t always feel hopeful. But they acted as if the future mattered. That was enough.

Now, when I sit with my children and they ask how we made it through, I tell them: it wasn’t through certainty or strategy. It was because people believed—again and again—that life could be good. That we could do things differently.

And we did.