But first, Peace People would give voice to the three children of the Maguire family, lost forever. “I called the local newspaper and told them we were asking the women of Ireland to join in a rally,” Betty remembers. “The editor says to hold the front page, and puts my name on it, along with my address. We had no concept of what was just about to happen.” On the night of the rally, buses from both the Protestant and Catholic sides of town streamed into the site where the children were killed. Ten thousand women stepped off those buses and into each other’s arms. Betty had never known healing like this in her life. “It was as though someone had brushed out more than eight hundred years of bad history,” she says.
Within days of the march, Betty and her collaborators organized a second rally, this one attracting more than thirty thousand people.
When we began writing this book, we set out to explore the legacy of trauma.
Long fascinated and inspired by human beings’ ability to bounce back from tragedy, we read hundreds of research studies on the topic and conducted more than a hundred interviews. Frankly, we expected most survivors to paint a grim picture. Understandably, many victims of trauma are emotionally overwhelmed by their experiences. Some are plagued by nightmares or overcome by fear.
The stories of people who suffer mightily from trauma are important. But we wanted to give voice to a different kind of story that people rarely hear. We wanted to learn from the experience of those who had encountered fundamental, life-altering growth in response to trauma and, as a result, had revolutionized their lives and often the world around them. We realized that if we were going to illustrate the principles that help people do this, we were going to have to find solid examples of such dramatic transformation.
At first we thought we’d be searching for a needle in a haystack. We were wrong—and were both surprised and enthralled by the incredible stories we encountered.
After two successful marches in Belfast, hundreds of thousands of people joined Peace People’s movement. To understand the significance of this remarkable feat, consider Northern Ireland’s more recent history. In 1964, when Betty was twenty-one years old, she witnessed the emergence of a civil rights movement to end discrimination against the mostly Catholic nationalist minority. The unwelcoming and sometimes violent response this movement received from elements of the mostly Protestant pro-British majority ignited a rise in violence by the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary group whose goal was the independence of Northern Ireland from Great Britain. In the 1970s, Betty’s city of Belfast became home to some of the worst unemployment, violence, and political strife in the Western world. Most people hoped that eventually the anger and violence would diminish and neighbors would be able to work together. Yet it took a few very special people such as Betty Williams and Máiread Corrigan to truly bring people together.
People tend to look at Betty Williams with a sense of awe. But the woman who stood against the cycle of violence in Northern Ireland believes that anyone could have stepped in to do what she did. “I hate to use the word ordinary, but I was just ordinary,” says Betty. “I was a happy woman with a lovely wee home, a car, a headband, and kids. I was content with my home, but not with what was happening on the streets of Belfast. I tried to live some kind of normality in a war situation. That’s all I did.”
To the outside world, Betty seemed somehow gifted with exactly the right combination of almost superhuman abilities and skills to get the job done. Who else besides Betty could bring together warring parties, salve decades-old wounds, and heal a hemorrhaging society? But Betty insists that she isn’t special.
This denial isn’t false humility. Betty truly believes that anyone in her position would have done exactly the same thing. As we interviewed supersurvivor after supersurvivor in preparation to write this book, we began to see that Betty wasn’t alone. Every tale of supersurvivorship began with an ordinary person living an ordinary life. And almost every one of our survivors insisted that we clearly and pointedly communicate this fact. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
In 1976 Betty was giving a talk to an audience in London at the Savoy Hotel. Afterward, she walked to the lobby, where a young man approached her.
“Congratulations, Miss Williams,” he said.
Betty looked oddly at the boy. She hadn’t yet heard.
“Ma’am,” he said, “you’ve just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Betty Williams and Máiread Corrigan were to be joint recipients of the coveted prize for their work with the Community of Peace People. Betty could hardly believe it. A year earlier, she was a receptionist. Today, she was among the most famous agents of change in the world.
And yet, as excited and honored as she was to win the award, she was conflicted. She didn’t believe that she deserved it. She believed that anyone could have accomplished what she had. The only difference was that she, like other supersurvivors, decided to change her life after experiencing something horrible.
Throughout this book, we’ve seen that the otherwise destructive forces of trauma can sometimes initiate dramatic positive transformation. But is it really necessary to suffer in order to experience this magnitude of change?
We posed this question to Betty. “One day I was sitting in my office and a group of prostitutes came to see me,” she responded. “One hands me a check for a hundred pounds. They didn’t know these children. But they cared. They lived here, too,” she says. “Pain will change you. It does change you. But so does knowledge.”
Betty decided that accepting the Nobel Prize would allow her to open new doors for the cause, spreading knowledge around the world to those who needed it. That included many people who had never experienced the conflict in Northern Ireland up close, but who could find within themselves the desire to change their lives and maybe the lives of others.
“I accepted this award on behalf of every woman in Northern Ireland who worked, sang, and walked for peace,” Betty says.
We intended to write a book about how a few extraordinary people had survived trauma. With the help of supersurvivors such as Betty, however, we ended up writing about how every one of us can live more fully. From Alan Lock, Maarten van der Weijden, and Casey Pieretti we learned a new way of rooting positive thinking in a brave and honest understanding of reality. From Paul Rieckhoff and Cindy Sheehan we learned the value of questioning even our most precious assumptions. From Paul Watkins and Candy Chang we learned that to live meaningfully and completely sometimes means admitting that we eventually will die. From James Cameron and Michael Bussee we learned that faith can bring both deep blessings and great burdens. From Aaron Acharya and Clemantine Wamariya we learned how forgiveness can be personally empowering. From Amanda Wigal and Jane McGonigal we learned the value of opening ourselves to the love and support of others. And from Asha Mevlana and Iram Leon we learned not to waste the precious choices life offers.
From each we learned that it is possible to brave life’s trials with a deep sense of hope, and that, rooted in the act of confronting the entanglements of life, every one of us has the capacity to be super.
Acknowledgments
We cannot adequately measure the weight of our gratitude to the survivors who lent their voices and their experiences to this book. We were overwhelmed by their willingness to open up about their lives, have been personally touched by their ordeals and their triumphs, and are honored to be entrusted with their uniquely harrowing stories.
In addition, we extend our special thanks to Dan Farley, a man of considerable generosity of spirit and sage guidance. We are deeply grateful to Richard Pine, whose council creates a particular sort of alchemy that turns ideas into reality and agents into comrades. The same can be said for the fine people at Inkwell Management, especially David Hale Smith, Alexis Hurley, Lizz Blaise, Nathaniel Jacks, and Eliza Rothstein. We reserve a special acknowledgment for Karen Rinaldi, our incredible editor, who defined, and then redefined, resilience for us. Our appreciation extends t
o her staff, Jake Zebede, Julie Will, Stephanie Cooper, Steven Boriack, and the entire team at HarperCollins—in particular HarperWave, an imprint with the exhilarating goal of changing readers’ lives.
Mimi Kravetz and Vin Eiamvuthikorn quite literally endured years of listening to us talk “book,” and their patience and wisdom remain our secret ingredient. Additional thanks goes out to Janis Cooke Newman, whose encouragement cultivated a seed of an idea into this book, as well as to Ethan Watters, Po Bronson, Stacy Perman, and Ellen Geiger.
We are grateful to our families, Jim and Terri Kravetz, and Michael and Pamela Feldman, who instilled in us a deep curiosity about the world. Additional thanks go out to Ryan Elliot Kravetz, Carin and Paul Feldman, Vicki Tsi, Liora Bowers, Lilach Shafir, Tony D’souza, Mona Kerby, Dina Nayeri, and Daniel Steven, who provided foundational support.
We were humbled by the generous backing of people and organizations, including John Carpenter, Adam Savage, Dan Tapster, M5 Industries, the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, AMP’D Gear, the Before I Die Project, and The Bucket List Foundation. Further thanks go to the International Paralympic Committee, the Sigi Ziering Institute, Lucky Duck Productions, the NYU Cancer Center, America’s Black Holocaust Museum, the Iraq Afganistan Veterans of America, Stanford University Hospital and Clinics, Psychology Today, The Huffington Post, Cancer Care of New York, the NYU Clinical Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University Hospital, and Gopi Kallayil at Google Inc.
We wrote much of this book as inhabitants of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. Spaces have souls, and the Grotto’s overflows its confines of brick and mortar.
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