Feeling Eeyore-ish?
This is not a word that I usually use in the context of work – or at least not in my communications with clients. Eeyore is a stuffed donkey in the Winnie-the-Pooh novels by A.A. Milne. His entire character is summed up in the following passage:
“Good morning, Eeyore,” said Pooh.
“Good morning, Pooh Bear,” said Eeyore gloomily. “If it IS a good morning,” he said. “Which I doubt,” said he.
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.”
Eeyore-ishness is something that all of us feel from time to time: a state of hopeless, helpless and at the same time strangely noble pessimism, a deep understanding of our own hapless condition that no other being could possibly share. The attribution of this habitual mental state to a stuffed donkey prone to lose his tail was an act of genius of the part of A.A. Milne.
And now the point. I am currently trialling dictation software in the office, and, in the course of a recent email to a friend, described myself as having an Eeyore-ish moment. And the software picked it up and transcribed it perfectly first time.
Is that, I wonder, a reason for writers to be optimistic about the future of our craft? Or rather, and rather Eeyore-ishly, deeply pessimistic?