Books on Happiness / HarperCollins,.It's All in Your Head - Thinking Your Way to Happiness.[2006.ISBN0060759992]

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cialist in business acquisition, Daniel has years of experience that enable him to quickly zero in on the strengths and weaknesses of any business that’s up for sale. He’s renowned for being able to close complex negotiations in a single session. Daniel’s reputation is such that even after raising his fees dramatically, he’s still turning down clients.

Time doesn’t just add wisdom, it takes away suffering too. Benjamin Disraeli called time “the great physician,” playing on the old saying that time heals all wounds. As time passes, injuries you’ve suffered, whether physical, emotional, or psychological, become less painful. Sure, there may still be a scar or a soreness, but the pain isn’t as intense or potentially debilitating. Broken hearts mend. The death of a loved one never leaves us, and there’s always a missing piece in our lives. The dissolution of a serious relationship cuts deeply. But the passage of time helps shift focus from the negative to the positive. The more time passes, the more time you spend thinking about the good years and the less time you spend thinking about the final days.

Bernice Sitney, fifty-three, thought she’d never get over the death of her daughter, Tina, at age ten from leukemia. But twenty years later, she’s never seen without her makeup on and her hair just right and she finds herself thinking more about the ten years of joy that Tina gave her than the pain of those final few months. Tina’s death and Bernice’s subsequent divorce led her to go back to school to study social work. For the past ten years, she has been working with hospital patients and their families.

Thomas Jefferson suggested, “When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.” Jefferson’s advice works because anger drains away as time passes. In the short term, just taking a breath and allowing the initial “fight or flight” reflex to subside helps overcome anger. The English have a lovely

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way of encouraging this kind of pause. They say, “You’re never too busy for a cup of tea.” While their teatime is not as ritualized as the Japanese tea ceremony, the English will take time out in the midst of a crisis, whether personal or professional, brew a “proper cup” of tea, and then sip it calmly. The enforced break almost always allows calmer heads to prevail.

Diane Milton, a pale twenty-seven-year-old with maroon hair, hates dealing with bureaucracies, particularly insurance companies. When she received notification from her health insurance provider that it wouldn’t cover the Botox injections she’s getting for her severe migraines, she dreaded making the appeal telephone call. Her fears were realized when she found herself talking to a less than sympathetic or helpful person. Rather than getting angry, yelling at the insurance company employee, hanging up the telephone, and probably giving herself a migraine, she took a deep breath and asked to speak to a supervisor.

Looking back, Mark Twain saw that time helped put even profound issues in perspective. “When I was a boy of fourteen,” he wrote, “my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” At the age of twenty you might be hurt and unforgiving about your father’s failure to attend any of your lacrosse games in high school. By the age of fifty you may not have forgotten the slights, but you’ve forgiven the old man. As you age and come face-to-face with your own shortcomings, it’s easier to overlook the shortcomings of others. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “Time heals grief and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.”

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end up in the same place. Every human being suffers from a fatal disease: life. No matter how much money and effort you spend trying to hold back the clock, it will move ahead. You can no more stop the hands of time from turning than you can stop a mighty river from flowing. You can try to dam or divert it, but it will flow somewhere. Time will pass—your children will leave the nest, you will develop wrinkles, loved ones will die—no matter what you do. We are mortals. “Do not try to live forever,” advised George Bernard Shaw. “You will not succeed.”

While we’re all destined to end up in the same place, we do have a choice as to what our journey will be like. If you think your life is half-over, you’ll spend the rest of it being miserable or trying desperately to regain your youth. If you think your career has peaked, you’ll spend the rest of your working years chasing the past or doing nothing of consequence. If you think you’ve been a financial failure, you’ll forever focus on what you lack rather than what you have. If you let time become your enemy, you’ll spend the rest of your life either in the past or just waiting to die.

Sam van Pelt, thirty-four, is clearly living in the past. As a young man growing up in a small Minnesota town, Sam was the local hockey hero. After leading his high school to the state championship, Sam went on to star in college and then made it to the National Hockey League. Sam was building a solid hockey career for himself until he suffered a series of concussions. Told by his doctor that playing any longer would lead to permanent brain damage, Sam had to hang up his skates at age twenty-nine. Since that tipping point, Sam hasn’t been able to move ahead. He returned to his old hometown, bought a bar, filled it with his hockey memorabilia, and now holds court every day and night. Sam tells the same old stories to the same people night after night.

You don’t have to end up stuck in the past, like Sam. If you

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embrace time, if you adopt the attitude that the passage of time is wonderful, your life will improve. If you think your career will keep improving, you’ll look forward to work each morning. If you feel your financial life will keep getting better you’ll relish all you do have. If you keep looking forward to tomorrow, every day you’re alive will be better than the day before. View the passage of time positively and you’ll even make death a non-event; you’ll spend your life actually living rather than just surviving. Michel de Montaigne wrote, “I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”

(View the passage of time positively and you’ll even make death a non-event; you’ll spend your life actually living

rather than just surviving.

Laura Bennett, forty-seven, looks forward to each morning. Seven years ago, just after her fortieth birthday, the painfully thin brunette was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a mastectomy and a long course of chemotherapy, Laura got a clean bill of health. A successful marketing executive, Laura was unattached at the time. She had her share of dark days and even darker nights. There were moments she beat herself up over having put her career first. There were other times she wanted to give up finding anyone with whom to share her life. But she resolved to look forward and regain her optimism. Although she’s still single, she is currently involved in a long-term relationship and is training to compete in a triathlon.

I have a great deal of admiration for people like Laura. I realize how hard it can sometimes be to see that life gets better. In the past few years, I’ve buried my mother, my younger brother, my younger sister, and, as I was writing this book, my father. I

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now find myself the last of my immediate family. I’ve seen one of my daughters and sons-in-law forced to deal with chronic disease. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not writing this in an effort to prompt sympathy. Nor am I looking to top any reader’s litany of woes. I just want to point out that, like everyone else, I’ve had to deal with sadness. But despite these events, I have faith life gets better. No—it’s not that I have faith life gets better, I know life gets better. I see it every day. I see how Mark’s writing and my consulting work keep improving. I see how my friendships deepen. I see how my love for my wife grows more profound. I see how my pride in my children continues to soar. And I see how my grandchildren blossom. I choose to see how my life gets better. And that makes all the difference.

You have a choice in how you view the world. You can focus on injustice and sadness and misery, or you can focus on justice, happiness, and joy. There’s a wonderful story about two friends facing this choice. It originally appeared in the 1950s as a short story entitled “My War with Hersh Rasseyner,” written by Chaim Grade. Since then it has been adopted into a play and a short film. The three works vary somewhat but essentially tell the same story. One day a successful writer named Chaim is walking through a park in a city he’s visiting. He sees a familiar face. Chaim is overjoyed to realize the familiar face is his childhood friend Hersh. Both men grew up in pre–World War II Poland. They were students in the same yeshiva. Both were caught up in the Holocaust and lost all their families and, they thought, all their friends as well. After reveling in their joint survival, the two begin to debate their different reactions to the circumstances of their lives: Chaim’s reaction has been to become an agnostic, while Hersh’s response has been to grow even more devout.

Thank God the choice most of us face isn’t as stark as that which faced Chaim and Hersh in the story. But like them, you

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have a choice. You can believe time is a negative force you must battle or a positive force making your life better. You can focus on your death or you can focus on your life.

Taking Baby Steps

Even putting the choice in such stark terms, I know it’s not easy. It’s hard to change your attitude toward time. Isaac Newton wrote that a body at rest tends to remain at rest and that a body in motion tends to remain in motion. If you’ve spent years being depressed, sitting on the shore rather than riding the positive river of time, you’re like a body at rest; it will take some effort to get you moving. The good news is that once you start moving, you’ll tap into the flow and pick up speed; you’ll be like a body in motion. The secret is to take some baby steps out into the river to get you thinking and acting positively.

Pick an area or aspect of your life about which you’re feeling negative. Say, your career. Take out your journal and turn to a blank page. Title the page “Negative Trends.” Start writing down what about your life is making you feel negative. For example, if you feel your income isn’t increasing as quickly as it should, write that down. If you think you’ve been passed over for promotion, note that as well. The idea is to take an abstract problem and make it concrete. Take each of the concrete examples you’ve written and give them a bit of thought. Set down your journal and do something to free up your mind, like taking a walk.

When you next get a chance, pick up your journal again. Turn back to “Negative Trends.” Turn to the next blank page and title it “Turnarounds.” Write a series of solutions to the problems you listed on the “Negative Trends” page. Let’s go back to the sense that you’re not earning enough salary. The solutions you