Always Looking Up

I missed the TV special about the nature of optimism last May, and have been regretting it ever since. It was to be a discussion into the nature of optimism, with Michael J. Fox as host and I simply forgot to set the DVR to record it.
But oh, well. I put myself in the library's queue to check out his book, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, thinking that would have to suffice.
My name finally came up (apparently a lot of people in the library system are chasing after not enough books) and I finished it last week.
And, well, I still wish I'd seen that TV special.
My mistake was in thinking that the show would cover essentially the same ground as the book, only in less detail. From the promos I read, Fox was going to visit the country of Bhutan, which is unusual in that it takes the happiness of its citizens into account in setting national policy. And he was going to have some people on to talk about the nature of optimism.
Just the idea that network television was going into a subject this deep gave me my own little shivers of optimism, celebrity or no.
But, again, I missed it. So did the book deliver the same thing?
Not exactly.
Always Looking Up was more of a bio of the most recent years of Fox's life (Lucky Man: A Memoir was the earlier one). There was no visit to Bhutan, nor much philosophical discussion of the nature of optimism--though there was some.
Always Looking Up is divided into four parts--work, politics, faith and family--and of those, work and politics take up most of the space. That should have told me right there that I wasn't going to get the philosophical road map to optimism I'd hoped for.
The section on work described Fox's decision to give up his acting career and the inspiration behind his Michael J. Fox Foundation, which raises money for finding a cure for Parkinson's. That section flows seamlessly into the politics section, which is full of tales about his involvement in presidential and congressional politics. This section gives an inside look on how it feels to be slammed by the ultra-conservative media, most notably Rush Limbaugh and his reprehensible mocking of Fox's Parkinson's symptoms.
Faith and family then cover Fox's relationships with his wife and kids, his reflections on their involvement in Judaism (his wife's heritage) and his encounters with the Christianity of his own background.
So most of the book is--as expected in any bio--stories and anecdotes about Fox's life. And this is just the reason I found it so frustrating.
Don't get me wrong. They're interesting stories and well written. But when I put it down I did not feel any clearer about what makes Fox an optimist while others struggle with depression.
Other than maybe he was just born that way. At one point, he writes about dropping out of high school and leaving Canada to try his fortune in the entertainment industry. If that isn't the definition of a born optimist, I don't know what is.
This is a problem I've run into time and again in my quest to become optimistic. People who already are optimists, like Fox, have it so ingrained that it's hard for them to describe the process. It's just there for them. What struggle?
And then people like me have to fight every single personality trait. Personal accomplishment? I was just lucky. Financial boon? Better save it for the inevitable "other shoe." Don't set your sights too high, you'll just be disappointed. Risk-aversion therapy, here I come.
Read it, though. At the very least, it will make you feel like contributing to a worthy cause.