Hope and health ANDREW MCDONALD


To travel optimistically


Under the pseudonym ‘Patrick Chivers’, Andrew McDonald has reflected in The Tablet about living with Parkinson’s disease. Now under his own name he writes of how his optimism and hope endure in spite of a more potent threat


G


audete Sunday, 2007: I stand in the pews, my family by my side, tears on my cheeks. I listen to St James’ confident expectation of


the coming of the Lord (5:7-10). And I am confirmed in my defiance. Defiant in the face of the news, 24 hours old, that I have Parkinson’s disease. In the pages of this mag- azine I declare that I am a fortunate man, a hopeful man. Gaudete Sunday, 2010: Again I hear James’


encouragement: like the farmer, we must bide our time, knowing that the harvest will come. I hear it, but can I heed it? Again I look to my family by my side; again I feel tears in my eyes. This time it is not the Parkinson’s that


haunts me: that foe remains, but for the moment I have its measure. Its progress is certain, the dimensions of its challenge cal- culable. Now I have a new foe, one cloaked in uncertainty. A cancer once thought to be indolent is now more active. It might have spread. Face to face with my mortality, I can muster nothing more than a numb insensi- bility. Hope, for once, seems to be beyond my reach.


And yet within days I find myself writing to friends that I am “cheerfully, recklessly optimistic” in the face of my impending oper- ation. But I do so after the immediate threat has receded; the doctors have played down the risk of any spread. And so what am I to


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make of the hope I announced to the world three years ago? And what of my confidence in my good fortune? I customarily present myself to the world


as a confirmed optimist, but what is the value of a currency one cannot turn to account when it is most needed? My hope in the future did not desert me when I felt I had a future, albeit one characterised by disability. But for a moment, at least, it was overwhelmed by the thought that even that future might be denied me. Hope and optimism are so fundamental to


my sense of who I am and of who I want to be that this episode prompts me to introspec- tion. Is my optimism no more than a prudential calculation? Look for positive out- comes and one is more likely to find, or create, promising opportunities. The confident search for those opportunities is more rewarding – personally, and for those around me – than their gloomy denial. The empirical evidence of my daily life con-


firms me in this view. I hold to it. But not because I believe the practice of positive think- ing, by itself, yields good outcomes. The American writer Barbara Ehrenreich has done much to expose that belief as unreasoning and unreasoned. No. My optimism unques- tionably has an emotional hold over me; but it is also stolidly utilitarian. If I didn’t think it helped me, working with my colleagues, to get through hard times, I would march to a different drum. But is that all it is – a calculation of the bal- ance of advantage, an investment to be made while the going is good and dropped if it no longer pays its dividend? I want to dismiss this notion. I want to believe that the roots of my optimism, and of my hope, are more profound and tenacious. Challenged by a friend to explain why my disposition is at once optimistic and hopeful, I turn to reasons of nurture. (I set aside reasons of nature, instinctively wanting my outlook to be more than the product of my brain’s bio- chemistry, but I concede that I am not competent to make such a judgement.) I reach for an explanation in my upbringing. The son of a Catholic mother and a


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Protestant, Fabian father, I was raised to believe tomorrow could be better than today, but that I had a responsibility to make it so. Optimism and obligation were fused. I accepted the concept of social progress,


14 | THE TABLET | 16 July 2011


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