Your assignment is to live a charmed life in the midst of people who don’t believe you can do it , and to accomplish this despite them, not to spite them.

Chances are there is at least one significant person in your life who thinks that all this charmed-life stuff is ridiculous. They may have told you to grow up, be realistic, and get with the program. Of course, it’s their program, some variation on the theme of “Very few people do anything exceptional, and you won’t be one of them.”

They might begrudge the time you spend reading books like this one and putting the suggestions you find there into practice. They may cite every time you’ve been sad or angry or things didn’t work out the way you wanted as evidence that you’re deluding yourself.

Standing at a kids birthday party one Saturday, I overheard a mother use the words before kids . . . to start a sentence. “Before kids,” she went on to say, “it seemed like we had a lot of money!” The other parents chimed in, nodding their heads. “Before kids” . . . another mother said, “I used to run triathlons.”

Rediscover Who You Are
Before kids . . . we traveled the world. And not just travel, but adventure travel! Our trips often led us to exciting and unpredictable destinations, and experiences that changes our lives. We worked in orphanages in Romania, holding tiny babies that had been abandoned by their mothers. We made friends with gypsies on the street, flew back one year to be at the bedside of a dying friend we’d met there who my husband grew to love like a father.

I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s when parents still told their kids to go outside and play. My friends and I would spend all day in the yard and when we got hot and sweaty enough we’d run to the back patio, open the water spigot on the side of the house and get down on our hands and knees so we could get low enough to turn our mouths up for a drink of water that splashed all over our faces and down our necks.

In the evenings I remember seeing my parents shaking their heads as they watched the oil crises in the 1970’s unfold on the nightly news. Gas prices skyrocketed to 73 cents a gallon! “Turn it off,” my mother would say to my dad. “Good grief! The wheel’s are coming off but they make it sound like the world’s ending.”

Here are some reflections on what science has to say about gratitude, which has been called the “forgotten factor” in happiness research.

Psychologists Robert Emmons at the University of California at Davis, and Michael McCullough, at the University of Miami, are foremost researchers in field of gratitude. What they have learned so far is that gratitude is good for you, really good for you.

In an experimental comparison, people who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). It doesn’t end there.