I met Lucia at a writing seminar. Damsel was slight, with a lined, hardluck appearance and unruly cloudy hair that missed her darting brown sight. Twelve of us, all strangers, sat in a loose circle in a sunny high - solitude sanctum condo waiting for the first rally to bring about. Our general, a successful and engaging author of personal rise books, arrived and this day handed out sprinkle bottles and instructed us to drink and place on drinking to stay ahead of headaches and module other high pinnacle symptoms. It was a way of telling us we ' d be safe here.
Each of us had a book project in reason and came for help in shaping it into a best - seller. He told us what to expect: Each of us would get two hours to seat out our book theory, the cartel could ask clarifying questions and yield feedback, and he would replenish tete-a-tete about how to locus the topic to catch the affection of a large audience. But first, we would get to know each other.
He divided us into pairs and told us to interview each other, and be prepared to introduce each other to the congregation using one amazing truth learned during the conversation. Lucia and I were a yoke. I don ' t call up the amazing actuality, but I do remember that we learned that we had remarkable overlap in what our early lives had been like. Both of us grew up only children of widowed mothers living in modest circumstances in a big city; both became therapists; both had two children almost grown; and both had killer book ideas.
As we talked on about our parallel histories, I questioned her about her experience growing up without a father and what she ultimately made of it. My killer book idea was that personal narrative, the story you tell about yourself, has everything to do with how your life turns out and your level of satisfaction with it. And that if you are not satisfied, changing that narrative is the - or at least one - route to transformation.
So how could I not ask? Plus, of late I had been putting an excess of energy into finally sorting out my parental loss and how it figured into my own story, so my curiosity could not be contained, even if it took us beyond the prescribed activity.
Lucia answered, " I remember everyone always saying to my mother, ' Isn ' t it a shame that you have to support Lucia alone? ' ' It ' s such a shame that Joe left you with such a hard life. ' Everything was " a shame. " I took that in, and that ' s how I lived my life for years. Ashamed. " She explained that she ' d been prone to disconnection and self - pity from girlhood, and the expectation that life would be a struggle. She ' d had to work hard as an adult to come out of it.
I didn ' t know what to say, not a common occurrence. I realized that there was a sentence that rang through my childhood too, directed to my mother Jessie: " Aren ' t you lucky that you have Carolyn? " Or to me, " Your mother is so lucky to have you. " Or overheard around relatives ' tables, " Thank goodness you two have each other. " You hear that difference? It was all about luck and good fortune. Going through family mementos one year I found a note from my father written during a business trip asking how " my girls " were doing, a pretty apt description of how it felt even after he was gone.
I ' d long wondered where my disposition toward appreciation and gratitude came from, and originally figured that they came easy to me because of my early loss. It was no problem for me to tell the difference between an annoyance and a real tragedy that was worth getting worked up about. I didn ' t need to make gratitude lists to open my eyes. They were open.
But Lucia proved that theory wrong. She had gone through the same loss, but assigned a different meaning, the opposite one even, and got a quite different outcome. In fact, the encounter with Lucia fueled my determination to write that book. The learning: It ' s not what life throws at you, it ' s how you catch it. The meaning that Lucia put to her fatherlessness and how I saw mine activated whole different sets of neurons in our developing brains and sent us down entirely different paths. She developed grim expectations, the opposite of my knee - jerk optimism.
As I look around, what is not to be grateful about? I see others whose attention is drawn to the negative - the latest political scandal or crime statistics or fears about health care or taxes. Happily for me, my attention goes instead toward a dynamite sunset, or a poke in the ribs from a friend, or a good medical report.
Does that make me a Pollyanna, or worse, a self - congratulatory one? Not so. I am lucky, not admirable. I can meet trouble when I run into it, but it just can ' t trump the rest.
Dr. Martin Seligman, a founder of the positive psychology movement, asks if the word in your heart is Yes or No. He rushes to say that even if right now it is No, there is plenty you can do to nudge it toward Yes, which brings rewards of pleasure, protection against physical and emotional difficulty, and greater achievement. Ask Lucia who worked hard to move in that direction.
I already know that my word is Yes. I ' m grateful for that, and that I met Lucia who taught me the lesson of her life, that Yes is worth fighting for.
