Yesterday I went on a tour of an abandoned railway station in my city. It’s now secured from trespassers and the elements by a volunteer group working towards restoring it, but during the years it was left unprotected it suffered badly at the hands of former owners, vandals, and the weather.
The tour guide (one of the group’s volunteers) was far more optimistic than I am about the future prospects of the station. The estimated costs of just physically repairing and restoring the station are staggering - on the order of $50 million. And honestly, that’s probably the easier part: the neighborhood surrounding the station has seen much better days and is a couple of miles out from the downtown core, so it’s a difficult sell to developers for conversion to apartments or condos, or even for restoring train service.
But these volunteers just keep chipping away at it, cleaning out debris, patching the holes in the roof, sprucing up the main concourse so that events and conventions can be held there, and they’ve done an amazing job so far. I don’t know if I can believe in the tour guide’s hope that in 10 years the station and the neighborhood will be thriving again, but his optimism was inspiring, and I went home feeling hopeful.
Then today I was talking to a colleague about this, and he was far more negative than I expected. It will cost far too much to restore the station. This country doesn’t invest in passenger rail. No one will ever want to live in that neighborhood - it’s too far from everything and you’ll get mugged when you’re walking your dog. The only hope for the station is to bulldoze the surrounding neighborhood flat and start from scratch.
What a cold shower, but there’s a grain of truth in all of that.
So today I was thinking about the relationship between optimism and realism.
There’s a new restaurant opening downtown soon. It’s going to be mostly vegetarian and vegan cuisine, and will also feature music and art and community classes and events. The owners look young and idealistic. I wish them the absolute best. I just hope that in addition to being idealistic, they have a solid foundation of realism, with the business savvy to figure out how to make their dream work.
Sometimes people perceive optimism and realism as mutually exclusive worldviews. “Jack is an optimist.” “Jill is a realist.” I disagree. I think it’s important to possess both traits. Optimism without realism leads to pie-in-the-sky plans that never had a chance, and businesses that fail because the numbers could never work out. But realism without optimism leads to nothing ever changing, because it makes you unable to see beyond what something currently is to what it could be.
Somewhere in the middle is where truly great things get done.