by Amy Newmark
The trouble was, my heart had been shattered. One can’t face the level of betrayal I had experienced and expect not to think about it. The more I tried not to, the more I did.
Again, it was the waitress’s wise words that helped. I asked myself, What fills my heart with smiles? The key was to flood my mind with as many of those thoughts on a daily basis as possible. Make it so there was no room for bad thoughts.
I set about filling my moments with as much “happy” as possible. I made lists not only of what brought me joy in the present, but also things to look forward to once I got better. I listed things I wanted to try, places I wanted to see, and people I wanted to visit. I watched sitcoms and romantic comedies. I cherished the time with my husband, friends and pets even more.
Happy cells are healthy cells.
And whenever the bad thoughts threatened to take over, I’d gently but firmly remind myself, “Happy cells are healthy cells.”
I just passed the “ten years in the clear” remission mark, so when I say this is a mantra I live by, I really mean it.
— C. L. Pryor —
The Can Man
Know that you can, believe that you can, and know with ALL of your heart that you will. You will succeed in spite of any obstacles that may try to hinder you!
~Stephanie Lahart
When I was a teenager, my favorite word was “can’t.” I can’t dance. I can’t do this homework. I would usually do these things anyway, but only after first saying that I couldn’t.
The summer after I turned fourteen, I was in Spokane for my annual three-week visit with my father and he got to hear my constant “can’t” mantra firsthand. As he often did on my yearly visit, he took me to sit in on the marketing class he was teaching at the local community college. I was getting ready to tune him out and tune into my book when one of his students said “I can’t understand” in reference to something in the curriculum.
My dad stood up at the front of the room and said, “No!” It seemed out of character for a laid-back Southern guy, but there he was going off on the word “can’t.”
“ ‘Can’t’ has no business in this classroom,” he said. “It’s bad enough I get it from her,” he pointed at me, “but she’s young yet and hasn’t figured out that ‘can’t’ is the worst four-letter word in the English language.”
His students just stared at him for a minute, and I put down my book. My dad’s tangents were the stuff of legend in my life and always funny, but that’s why companies paid him to come in and motivate their employees for a couple of hours. He had a great stage presence and a knack for making things understandable. I think his classes were probably pretty interesting for his students.
With everyone’s eyes on him, he started pacing the front of the classroom, turning off the projector and changing the day’s lesson plan. “Four-letter words are impolite in mixed company — and my daughter is sitting there — but we all know what those words are. A few four-letter words get thrown around like they aren’t offensive, and chief among them, is ‘can’t.’ If you’re going to stand there and tell me you can’t, you’ve already failed. You’ve already convinced yourself that you can’t, and nothing I say or do is going to convince you otherwise,” he explained.
“Your homework — and yours, too, daughter dear — is to go home and find yourself a can. Get one of those big markers and write the words ‘Can Can’ on it. Every time you say ‘can’t’ this week, I want you to write down what you can’t do and put it in the Can Can. At the end of the week, go through them and see how many opportunities you missed because you think you can’t. Turn each of those ‘can’ts’ into a ‘can’ and see how much you can achieve.”
When we got back to his house after class and dinner at my favorite restaurant, he actually made me make my own Can Can. All the things in my Can Can were things I actually could do; I just didn’t want to put in the effort.
As a kid, his Can Can made me roll my eyes, but as an adult I think he was pretty on point. Twenty-five years later, going through his things after he passed, I found the printouts he’d made for his class for several years after that first one. Joe’s Can Can became a regular lesson in his classes, and the point was that there are enough obstacles in life without becoming one for yourself. Now my children are the petulant teenagers with great affection for the word “can’t,” and I’m seriously considering having them make their own Can Can.
My dad was the ultimate can man. He never met a “can’t” he couldn’t turn into a “can.”
— Sarah Wagner —
Could I Trouble You?
No life is so hard that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.
~Ellen Glasgow
It was about five years after my divorce was finally over. I was broke. I was depressed. There were far too many days when the bottle of sleeping pills on the counter looked less like a coping mechanism and more like a permanent solution. Every day was like running a marathon, except there was no medal and no cheering at the finish line. I was utterly alone, and life felt hopeless.
In one rare moment of lucidity, I signed up for a free weeklong trial membership at a local gym. To my mind, gyms were where already fit people went to admire each other. They weren’t where sad, out-of-shape single mothers went in their worn-out sweatpants and T-shirts. And yet, I trudged to the gym for seven mornings in a row. Each morning, I pulled myself onto an elliptical machine and watched the minutes tick by. Each morning, I resolved to come back and do a little better the next day.
This is not a story about how getting physically fit is a path to happiness. This is a story about a book on tape (that’s right — a good, old-fashioned cassette) that I listened to at the gym, and the four words I heard that helped me change my life.
Cruising on an elliptical machine is not exactly the height of entertainment. To wile away the time I spent there, I picked up an old pile of cassettes that I inherited somewhere along the way — probably from my mother, an avid reader of self-reflection materials. Since I am a keeper of all things nostalgic, I still had my portable cassette player from high school and an old set of foam-covered headphones. I spent the week listening to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Mr. Carnegie, a brilliant author without question, packed a lot of information into his book. But just four little words have stuck with me for years: When faced with the opportunity to ask for help, preface every question with, “Could I trouble you?”
The idea is simple, really. According to Carnegie, when you use these four words, you tell people that you understand you need something from them. You acknowledge them as people. You understand that you may be asking them to go out of their way for you. You put them before yourself, and you respect them. Simply put, you focus on someone other than you.
I heard the words he spoke, and I admit I had my doubts. After all, wasn’t I worthy of pity? Hadn’t I earned the right to put myself first for a change? Didn’t I deserve more from the world than what I’d gotten? What right did the world have to expect anything else from me? I was the one who had been victimized. I was the one suffering. I wanted the world to ask me if I could be troubled to help.
But those words tugged at me somehow. I heard them over and over again in my mind, long after I was off the elliptical. At last, in a moment of true self-reflection, free from the mental agony that made up my life, I decided to try.
At first, it was simple. When a waitress breezed by my table and ignored my empty glass, I didn’t bark at her. The next time she stopped, I asked simply, “Could I trouble you for a refill?” She paused and looked at me as though I’d spoken a different language. Eventually, she responded, “Of course, it’s no trouble at all!” And she came right back with my drink and delivered outstanding service the rest of my meal.
When I stopped at the bank and they were out of deposit slips, I didn’t tell the teller they had a problem. I said to her, “Could I trouble you for a deposit slip?” And she hurried to
give me one and replace the stack on the counter as well.
To the grocery clerk, I said: “Could I trouble you to make change for this ten-dollar bill?” I was rewarded with two fives, a thank-you, and a huge smile.
To the customer-service rep, I asked: “Could I trouble you to explain something on my bill?” I was given the credit I asked for and treated like a long-lost friend.
It took practice. First, it was like a game. Could I remember to say the words correctly, and how would the other person respond? Then it became a challenge. Could I make every person I interacted with smile that day? Before long, it was second nature. “Could I trouble you…?” became part of my everyday vocabulary. I often reflected on the title of Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I realized I was, in fact, influencing people. They were doing what I wanted, when I wanted, and they seemed happy to be doing so.
The real kicker was the influence I’d had on myself. I had been so focused on making those words a habit that I had stopped focusing on my misery. I enjoyed making other people smile so much that I began to smile more often myself. I started to see other people as they were. For that brief moment, I felt their pain, sacrifice, gratitude, and happiness. The people I encountered every day mattered. They were individuals and I had a chance to be a positive presence in their days.
It took years before my situation righted itself. It took months of hard work and dedication to make my life better. But it took only moments to make myself happier. Every single interaction with another human being is a chance to make someone feel special. In the moment it takes to ask, “Could I trouble you?” a seed of happiness is planted. Over a lifetime, those seeds grow into a bountiful harvest of joy.
— Karen Haueisen Crissinger —
Never Too Old
It’s never too late to start something new, to do all those things that you’ve been longing to do.
~Dallas Clayton
When I was turning thirty, a friend asked me to share my biggest regret in life. It didn’t take me long to say I most regretted not finishing college. I explained that I was considered smart in school, made great grades, and had big dreams. By giving up on it all, I felt like I was not only letting myself down, but also everyone who ever believed in me.
My friend said, “Why not now?” But with a son in elementary school, a job, and loads of other responsibilities at church and home, I had a million excuses. The one I thought was the strongest: If I went back, I would be thirty-two when I graduated.
“You’re going to be thirty-two anyway.”
What I heard back was something I will never forget: “You’re going to be thirty-two anyway.”
It was the simplest and wisest advice I could have received.
I could turn thirty-two with a college degree or without one, but I was going to be thirty-two anyway.
So I did it.
I earned my journalism degree and could not have felt prouder, thirty-two or not. And I have recycled this advice a dozen times. Aside from becoming Miss Teen USA or high-school valedictorian, there are very few things for which I am too late.
Do I really want to write my first book at forty-two? I’m going to be forty-two anyway.
Do I really want to learn how to dance in my forties? I’m going to go through my forties anyway.
Do I really want to run a half marathon in my fifties? I’m going to be fifty anyway.
Do I really want to be traveling in my sixties? I’m going to be in my sixties anyway.
I hope you never hear me say, “I’m too old for that.” Instead, I hope you hear me say, “I’m going to be eighty-five anyway.”
— Jen Chapman —
From Lemons to Lemonade
A Positive Message from a Time Traveler
It is often hard to distinguish between the hard knocks in life and those of opportunity.
~Frederick Phillips
Recently, I was cleaning out a closet and came upon several curious letters. They were all written on letterhead from various television stations around the country, all dated in late 1979. It took me a minute to recognize what they were, but as I read through them, I realized they were all rejection letters to me from various television news executives.
I wondered why I kept them. I vaguely remembered applying for the jobs. It was during a time in my television career when I was looking to make that next step toward more responsibility, a bigger city and a bigger salary.
I tried to get inside the brain of that 1979 version of myself to understand what I was feeling at the time. Why did I save these rejection letters? Was I trying to keep myself humble? Was there some hidden streak of masochism causing me to flog myself for my inadequacies?
Finally, I decided that I must have kept the letters specifically for this particular moment forty years later. I concluded that it might very well have been my version of time traveling, a way of sending a message to my “future self.” Yet, at the time, I could not have been sure of what that exact message might be.
Strange as it sounded, that rang true. After all, there were many times in my life when I felt that a particular event held some sort of special meaning, but I wasn’t sure of the full meaning at the time. The loss of a loved one, a failure in romance, a layoff, a poor investment — they all were life events whose significance only my future self could fully appreciate. My younger self must have sensed significance in those letters, but also suspected that it would require a future self to totally understand what that significance was.
And my present-day self did understand. Each of those letters represented a path not taken — not because I didn’t want to take it, or didn’t try to take it, but because someone else decided that for me. It was a reminder that my future is not totally in my control; I am not the master of my own fate.
And there was a second part to the message: The fact that I am not in complete control of my life is not necessarily a bad thing. Closed doors guided me as much as open ones had. That’s the message the present-day version of me now understands, but the 1979 version of me could only take on faith.
Closed doors guided me as much as open ones had.
That 1979 version of me who was rejected for TV jobs in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Greenville, South Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida, didn’t know that his 1981 version would get a job in a much bigger TV market in the Pacific Northwest. He didn’t know that his 1985 version would marry a woman there who was to be his lifelong companion, and that his 1991 version would be given a new opportunity for advancement. That early version of me didn’t know that my 1999 self would eventually be laid off from that job and then move his family cross-country to take a job at a national network. But the present-day version of me can look back on all those events and see that, although none of them was completely under my control, each had positive results.
So I’m thankful that my 1979 self sent me that message, even if he didn’t fully understand it at the time. I can’t travel back in time to thank him, but what I can do is send a message ahead to my 2029 and 2039 selves. That message is this: Life is most productive when you make the most of the path you’re on, not when you fret about what the other paths might have held.
So, to my future self: Stop trying to be in control. Don’t dwell on what might be on the other side of that closed door. Continue to make the most of every open door. And, one more thing, future self… you’re welcome.
— Nick Walker —
A Little Exercise Class
Movement is a medicine for creating change in a person’s physical, emotional, and mental states.
~Carol Welch
Years ago, I went through an extremely difficult breakup. My ex was an accommodating, kind gentleman who did everything for me. When our relationship ended, I realized I had become completely dependent on him. I felt frightened and helpless, thinking I was incapable of doing anything for myself.
The first time I went to the grocery store on my own, I felt vulnerable, lost, and alone. Having lost h
ope in myself, I turned into a pessimist.
To boost my spirits, a co-worker suggested that we attend an exercise class at the gym. I doubted an exercise class could make me happier, but I went along. As I stood inside the exercise room alongside my co-worker, the instructor turned on some loud music. Soon, the class kicked into high gear. Awkwardly mimicking the moves of the instructor, I was doing every cardiovascular move incorrectly. I was kicking to the left when everyone else was kicking to the right, and I was doing jumping jacks when everyone else was doing squats. I looked and felt ridiculous. On top of that, I was exhausted because the routine was very vigorous.
I desperately wanted to leave, but I stayed until the bitter end. The next morning, I woke to discover muscles I didn’t even know I had — and those muscles were extremely angry with me. I was so sore I could barely turn the steering wheel in my car or sit up straight in my seat.
Later that day, my co-worker asked, “Are you going to class with me tonight?”
For some inexplicable reason, I said, “Yes.” My second appearance in class was as humiliating as the first one and I vowed I would never return.
However, several days later, to my great surprise, I asked my co-worker if she was planning on attending the exercise class. She told me she had already moved onto another fitness regimen. I was now left in the uneasy position of going on my own. I thought of how powerless I felt the first time I went to the grocery store by myself. I wanted to overcome that feeling so I decided I would attend the exercise class alone.
For weeks, I flew solo in the class. Although I was uncomfortable, I kept going. Luckily, the moves became more familiar to me. I started to relax. Before long, I began to really enjoy myself. The music was catchy, the students were friendly, and I could feel that I was becoming stronger physically. I was now eager to attend the class.