The Positive Character

To a question about the meaning of life, the overwhelming majority of students, girls and boys, answered: “What I seek from life is triumph” — triumph in work, and in marriage, triumph in health — is triumph, then, the desire of every soul? So they decree. And in the course of searching for it, our eyes may begin to distinguish light from darkness, truth from falsehood..

We strive to triumph; so when do we succeed, and when do we fail? When do circumstances submit to us, humbled and pliant, and when do they shun us, so that we obtain of their bounty only a meager pittance?

An examiner's look at life — its exits and its entrances, its hidden corners and its secrets — discloses the causes of triumph. And as the examiners themselves differ, so does its conception differ. There are those whose eyes are dazzled by the materialism of this age, and who find triumph only in material armament — position and money... And there are those who are swept to the other extreme, turning their backs on matter altogether and preaching success by way of spiritual things and the return to God. And there is a third party that steers a middle course, joining the two at once... In my opinion, the root of triumph for all three groups is very nearly the positive character.

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Its possessor meets you, and his one concern is to soothe the wounds of your heart, though he may carry cares beyond your own.. He meets you beaming and cheerful, and the sluggish clouds of your soul are not long in scattering and melting, and you become light and easy of mind... He is of the kind that pulls you upward, always upward. He loves life; he passes over its calamities in a fleeting instant, and before its delights he lingers long moments. He loves people, and it is on their virtues, not their faults, that his thought dwells; he does not magnify the second at the expense of the first.

And the possessor of the positive character has one essential distinction: the strong will — the will that defies slender possibilities and makes of them footholds on which to lean for the attaining of a goal of far-reaching ambition, as though he were saying, in the fullness of his self-assurance: whatever is not impossible is possible, and once it is possible, what stands between me and it?

And what is life?? A long journey, they say, wrapped about by the unknown. And the loftier man's mission and the higher his station, the more perilous grow the crossings he must traverse, and the more thickly are snares and knots strewn across their breadth, laid for him now by fate and now by his brother man, to test his power to stand fast and hold firm in the face of the whirlwinds... Life slaps us a thousand slaps before it consoles our hearts with a single kiss; from afar it beckons to us with happiness, and we brighten at it and hasten toward it, and then its deceiving mirage is not long in turning away and vanishing.

Such is life — such is its unveiled face; but the positive man, the man of conquering will, is able to grasp his destinies in the clutch of his hand, to impose himself upon life, to draw up a design for his triumph, and straightaway to set about executing his design, leaping upward, until he comes to the summit, swaying there in pride, the wine of victory sweet in his mouth — a wine no wine on earth can equal.

Enough for me, by way of example, is the life of Helen Keller, the wonder of this century, who visited Beirut three years ago and stayed as a guest of this institute — how by her positiveness and her will she defied blindness and deafness together, man's two deadliest enemies; and the dark void in which she lives did not keep her from attaining, on the paths of glory, a height beyond compare...

Whenever there returns to my mind the serenity and contentment spread over her radiant face, and the victory of resolve in her every motion and stillness, my eyes fill with tears anew, and I believe in the singular human being who creates out of nothing, when he wills, prodigious things before which the limited mind stands bewildered.

And who says that the will of the graduating girl weighs light in the balance against the will of the young man? And who says that her resolve, for all the delicacy of the feminine temperament, does not take hold of the world's turnings even more than his does?

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There comes to my mind now the story of two brothers of opposite temperament, whose mother wished to verify how deep-rooted was what she knew in them of negativity and positivity. On Christmas Eve she set out for the negative one a small blue motorcar with a motor, and for the positive one a horseshoe... Morning came, and the two brothers awoke, each clasping his gift. The mother asked the first: Did your gift please you? He pouted and answered: It is blue, and I would have preferred it red. And its motor will soon break, and then it will not run! But the second answered: How I loved my gift, Mama! Thank Santa Claus for me.. What fault is it of his? I am certain he gave me a real horse, but the horse ran away in the night, leaving me this beautiful shoe of his?!

What a glaring contrast we observe between one human being and another! And if people could but know the essence of this truth, they would spare themselves great toil, and they would realize that upon their own will depends their happiness or their misery, the gloom of their hearts or their joy and gladness.

We may then set down, as established fact, that life is as we ourselves will it, not as it comes to us of its own accord. I do not mean that we can ward off the blow

(*) This address was delivered at the commencement exercises of Beirut College for Women.

of an inevitable treachery; rather, it lies within the positive man's power to receive whatever surprises life hurls at him with an open breast, be they surprises of good or of ill, and to shape them, knowingly, to his desire, and to press them into bondage to his wishes...

And why should we not pass beyond individuals to peoples and nations, when the massive volumes of our history offer us the clearest testimony? Are the superior nations those which treat their problems in a spirit of shortsighted negativity, or those whose suppleness, seasoned judgment, and long views are the surest check against rashness, haste, and the closing of roads at their very start? And the tragedy of Palestine, whose blood still seethes in our breasts, and which develops from day to day, from the grievous to the more grievous — has our negativity, I wonder, no share in bringing it about? Is it true that the blame, the whole blame, falls upon the high politics whose sinful fingers wove the chapters of this appalling tragedy?

Events have proven that negativity is weakness and positiveness is strength, and I fear that the breast of this age no longer has room for the weak and submissive, and that the positive man alone has hope of winning and prevailing. Never yet have I seen a weeper and complainer rise in the ranks — how should he make out his road through his tears and his grumblings?

The distinction of the cultivated, balanced person is that he can, once resolved, erase the traces of negativity, even those rooted deep in his soul, once it is proven to him that they drag him toward woe upon woe. And here is the point of departure toward a life more richly endowed with success. And it is my conviction that if the Arab peoples could curb their negativity — who knows what their affairs might come to? Who knows — “the face of history might be changed!” “Nothing comes to pass unless it be a wonder!”

The new generation that such lofty institutes as this send forth is the generation that understands life in the spirit of the positive, constructive character, and goes out into the world with a soul full of confidence that it will surely succeed and arrive at the fulfillment of its hopes — if not today or tomorrow, then in a year or in ten years. These are they into whose hearts faintness and despair find no path; these do not speak of their failure and of their vanished resolve of old — that season of their lives which leafed and bore fruit and then withered away. These look back only for a lesson to be felt, a moral to be heeded, and an error to be ascertained and never repeated — these have in their present and their future a broad open field where their free imaginations soar, lifting a hand only to set a new stone in the great human edifice.

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It has been said: “In the ending of school is the beginning of life” — so all good lies in a life we begin today, whose pillar is an optimistic positiveness that cannot be conquered, whose joints no cowardice or hesitation can shake, and from whose core shine the ideals of faith, resolve, and diligence — our lighthouse to the shore of the longed-for triumph.