The Contagious Nature of Urgent Optimism

The rain had finally stopped, but the air still felt oppressive. Everything in the small Guatemalan village was waterlogged. The earth and trees couldn’t hold any more water. Tiny streams of water seemed to sprout from the ground to run into the river that had swollen beyond its banks days earlier. The footbridge was gone, replaced with a tangle of broken boards, uprooted trees, and mud.

It was 1998, just after Hurricane Mitch. I was too young to remember (vividly) when Salt Lake City flooded after the massive runoff in 1983 or 84. While Honduras and Nicaragua took most of the beating from the Category 5 storm, Guatemala had been rattled hard too. Roads were gone. Crops washed away. Homes were destroyed. The port near Puerto Barrios was half-buried in mud.

I was there as a nineteen-year-old who spoke passable Spanish and thought I understood what “service” meant. But there’s a difference between a mission trip and a disaster zone. You can’t plan your way around destruction like that.

A handful of families had gathered near a small concrete structure that served as the schoolhouse during good weather and emergency shelter then. I remember the smell before anything else—smoke and wet earth, thick as a blanket. A few men worked to clear debris from the roadway while others salvaged whatever hadn’t been ruined by the floodwater.

That’s when I saw her.

A young girl, maybe nine or ten, stood beside her mother, who was crouched over a makeshift fire pit. They were boiling water in a dented aluminum pot. The girl handed out small plastic cups filled with something warm, café de tortillas, to the workers and neighbors who trudged past.

She didn’t say much, and most of us wouldn’t have understood her anyway. Q’eqchi’, the Mayan language she spoke, shares almost nothing with Spanish. So she smiled instead, offering the cup wordlessly to each person in line. Her beautifully ornate skirt was splattered with mud, her hair damp from the humidity. It couldn’t have been more than a few sips per person, but the effect was immediate. Shoulders eased, and voices softened. Someone even laughed.

That girl didn’t rebuild a single road or haul a single log from the river, but she changed the atmosphere of that whole place. The warmth of those cups removed the tension we’d all been carrying for days.

I didn’t have words for it then, but I do now: urgent optimism.

It’s not naive cheerfulness or wishful thinking. It’s the conviction that good is still possible and the courage to act on it right now. It’s hope with muddy shoes and burned fingers.

Rebecca Solnit once wrote, “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”

That girl didn’t have an axe. She had a small ladle and a few dozen plastic cups, and she wielded them as well as any man carrying an axe that day.

For much of my life, I believed optimism belonged to people who hadn’t seen enough of the world’s darkness to know better. Realists, I thought, didn’t waste energy on feelings. They fixed things. They stayed busy. They faced facts.

But the older I get, the more I see how wrong that is. Real optimism isn’t born of ignorance. It’s born of endurance. It’s not about ignoring how bad things are. It’s about refusing to believe that the bad gets the final word.

I’ve built companies. I’ve written stories. I’ve tried to hold my share of broken systems together. And yet I still think about that girl in the flood zone, handing out warm drinks she could barely afford to make. She didn’t wait for permission or perfect timing. She didn’t ask if it was enough. She just started doing what she could with what she had.

That’s what urgent optimism looks like. Not speeches or strategy sessions. Not waiting for the world to be fixed before you dare to believe in it again. Just a fire, a pot, and enough warmth to hand to the next person who needs it.

The floodwaters always come again, in one form or another. Storms, layoffs, wars, and losses, each one threatening to drown out our small hopes. But maybe optimism isn’t something we hold onto. Maybe it’s something we hand out, cup by cup, until the light finds its way back in.

I didn’t realize it then, but that girl taught me something textbooks never could: you can’t save everyone, but you can still serve someone. And sometimes, that’s what saves you.

Because optimism that waits isn’t optimism at all. The kind that changes things—the kind that heals and rebuilds—is the kind that moves.

And that is enough.