Nat

Last night, while my wife was inside a restaurant with friends, someone broke the window of her car and stole her briefcase. All it contained was her paycheck and documents she needs for her job, including two notebooks of handwritten notes for opinions she had to write. They were one of a kind originals, with no copies. Recreating them from memory would have been nearly impossible.

Local police spent the night looking for the briefcase, and my wife spent several hours trying to figure out what to do about the loss. She and I both said a prayer that, somehow, they would be safely returned. This morning, Sarah got up early to drive around some more looking and then drove to the auto glass shop, where the very nice technicians not only replaced her window by 10:30 a.m., but they even cleaned up every trace of broken glass and disturbance.

While she was on her way home, I received a phone call at the house from a gentleman who lives 3 miles from the restaurant. He told me that he walked his dog this morning near a highway overpass and happened to see some papers loose. When he looked more closely, he saw my wife’s briefcase and decided that it looked important. Carefully, he gathered up all the materials from the underbrush and cleaned them off. Finding only a business card and not wanting to keep my wife waiting till Monday, he rummaged around until he found a receipt from the car dealership, which my wife had stuffed in an outer pocket of the bag.

He called the dealership, told the story, and convinced them to give him our home number. I was able to call my wife with his address, and within 15 minutes, she had arrived at his house and retrieved everything in her bag except one cell phone charger. Everything of importance was there: all her notes, client papers, her paycheck, and a document containing our child’s name, address, and date of birth. Mike, the good samaritan, apologized over and over for going through her things to figure out how to contact Sarah. She assured him repeatedly that it was the best thing he could have done to make her happy.

On her way home, she told the wonderful police department that we had recovered everything. Then she headed to the bank, where she deposited her check in perfect time for me to pay some bills that are due this week.

All of this happened in 11 hours. Her faith in humanity has been completely restored. We all feel grateful. It’s a beautiful thing.

Today’s lead news story about the USAirways flight safely landing in the Hudson River in New York City has really inspired me. It is stunning and wonderful to see the media coverage that is typically devoted to a catastrophe focus instead on a catastrophe averted.

The superb reactions of the USAir flight crew to land and evacuate the plane safely, the seemingly orderly participation of the 150 passengers, who let women and children climb out first, and the fast response of ferry captains and rescue personnel to race to retrieve the passengers from the wreckage, remind us how well people can react to crisis.

I have been struck watching some of the interviews on the TV news tonight how measured the passengers appear in their comments. They are balancing joy in being alive with wonder that they could have come through something so nearly awful. One gentleman, a young doctor, struck a note that resonated with me: he said that, right at impact with the water, he braced for what he had learned to expect from the movies, an explosion, some object to tear him apart. Instead, several of them started shouting, “We’re OK. We’re OK. Let’s get out.”

I love the fact that the people had the presence of mind to figure out immediately that real experience could be better than one had been led to expect. This is grounds for celebration. The skilled pilots and the flight attendants all remembered their training and managed a once-in-a-lifetime challenge with intelligence, poise, and efficiency. The passengers who relied on them adopted the same level of thoughtful responsibility to assist in their own rescue.

What a triumph. It fills me with happiness. Reuters has some great photos.

The first major snow storm of the winter blew through southeastern Massachusetts this afternoon just before dark. Two inches had fallen by nightfall, which happens before 5:00 p.m. these days. Because her plans came together late in the afternoon, I agreed to take my stepdaughter to a friend’s house just as the storm hit its wildest point.

We probably should have turned around when I realized just how bad the roads were, but by that time we were halfway there, and it would have been disappointing to my child not to finish the trip. The drive was a little scary, but mostly because my imagination tends to kick in when things start to feel out of control. I tried to push out of my mind the idea that I might make a wrong turn in the dark on the way home and drive off the road.

It’s a good lesson to remember every once in awhile that we sometimes choose to think things are worse than they are. It’s easy to do with so many examples in the news and in our lives of things turning awful. How much better, though, to move the opposite direction and envision things being even better than they seem.

Our street lost power tonight after I ate dinner, so here I was alone in a house without lights or an internet connection. After complaining about it on the phone with my wife, I climbed into bed with my laptop and watched a silly romantic comedy with the last of my laptop battery.

I guess the point I’m making is that I can get carried away hoping things don’t take a turn for the worse, when it would be every bit as logical to hope that things will take a turn for the better. This sounds like a superficial kind of pretend game, but I mean it seriously. Where we have the chance to make things better through our determination, I think we have a duty to do it.

Nothing is more important.

The power has just come back on in time for me to finish this before bedtime.

I woke up this morning feeling angry and tired. I made the problem worse by staying in bed till I was going to be late for work. For some reason, and maybe it is withdrawal from caffeine, I couldn’t get myself to feel any sense of vigor. I haven’t been exercising regularly for 3 months, maybe 4. I stayed up too late 4 nights last week and drank coffee the next day, which I never do. I haven’t been a regular caffeine user for years.

So maybe today I was feeling disappointed in myself for not eating and exercising well. It doesn’t really matter, because I have been doing a lot of things I’m proud of. The way I am working through writing Christmas cards this year still makes me feel each night at bedtime that I know how to set a goal and work toward it.

I’m thinking that a day like today is a good test of how well I respond to the negative voice some of us carry around in our heads, the one that says, “You aren’t making any progress.” One good sign is that I recognize these bad moods for what they are. I realize they are not a permanent sign of a problem. In fact, a colleague at work told me this afternoon that I hadn’t seemed like myself all day. Naturally I felt good to think that my true self is more upbeat and friendly.

I am trying to learn lessons from days like today: that you can make things better by asking yourself at each moment of the day, “How can I feel better? What can I do?” Today I decided to try to solve a problem for a friend of mine. It was a small problem involving a computer, and it required me to run up and down the stairs to our computer support department. Up and down I ran, and on the third trip, I bumped into a work friend who has been out of the country for three months. We are having lunch next week. He looked great.

By 4:00 p.m., I felt fine, almost back to normal. And normal is good. It felt great to turn around a bad mood by helping a friend with something small. Maybe I’m learning.

For the third day in a row, I am absolutely exhausted. It seems like two weeks since I returned from Colorado, and that was only on Monday. Part of dealing with exhaustion is figuring out whether it is physical or emotional. I think it is both. I have really struggled this week to deal with the challenges in our office with good humor and optimism.

Sometimes I wonder whether well-being and joy are made in moments like these, when we feel they are far removed from us. How do I reach out and pull them to me? I think Esther Hicks and the Abraham guides would say this is where you reach for the better feeling thought. I agree that it helps to think of something that is better than I am thinking right now.

Right now I am thinking, it really still hurts where I was chewing a pretzel stick and jammed it into my gum. What is better than thinking that? My wife went to a charity auction tonight and won us tickets in a luxury box to see a Boston Celtics game in December. What a treat to spend the night in the city with my wife after a fun night out. That’s a much better thought.

Even thinking about my situation, I can find my way to “it is almost the weekend and there is the chance to sleep in and choose what to focus on for at least a few hours.” Maybe I will clean up my office. That would feel good and would take no more than 5 hours. It’s about simple steps.

A friend of mine lost his job not long ago, in a layoff. It’s hard for him to talk about without getting angry and sad. Eventually in some conversations he gets around to the question why they didn’t see the value he brought.

I don’t have an answer to his question, and I wish I did. I would like to peer into the future and see what his next job will be, to reassure him that the future is bright, that he will be fine. He doesn’t want to hear that from me, even if it is the truth.

Which brings me to the question: how do you respond to personal difficulties? Do you look for a silver lining, live with your disappointment and try to figure out the cause in something you did or didn’t do?

Here’s a quote from Ben Stein, which I found yesterday and love: “It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated – it is finished when it surrenders.” While I don’t want to preach platitudes to my friend, I believe in Stein’s line. We cannot surrender.

How do you do that in your life? What have you survived?

I have started a new journal exercise: each evening I write about the worst moment of my day, and then I write about the best moment of the day. The idea, when I started this three days ago, was to observe the challenge and start to identify a pattern or think about ways to avoid that kind of moment the next time I confront something like it. The idea for “best moment” was to appreciate the good that comes my way and to recollect how good things are in my life.

An interesting thing happened on yesterday. I couldn’t think of a “worst moment” to record. Of course, if you had forced me to, I could have picked a moment that was worse than all the others, but the point was that a bad moment didn’t easily occur to me.

I’ve tried to draw conclusions, but the obvious one is that, when I knew that I would be reviewing the day later for worst moments, something in my knew to avoid them during the day. What a great lesson that will turn out to be. If merely recalling consciously throughout the day that I am going to have to scrutinize what didn’t go well and try to find some way to avoid or improve upon this experience in the future keeps me from stumbling toward bad experiences, this exercise will prove almost magical.

Either way, I like the discipline. It’s especially wonderful to recall the best thing that happened (last night the Red Sox won a game to take them to their second World Series in four years!). I will keep doing this for awhile.

Blogging has been very difficult for me this summer, following my father’s passing in May. Although much of my study and effort to address this loss spiritually and emotionally are related to the core mission of our work at Cloud 9000, I frankly felt that blogging about them would be a betrayal of my family’s privacy. Yet finding renewed joy and purpose in the face of sadness and loss has been the great work of this summer.

One of the lessons is that small gestures of sympathy and kindness from friends and acquaintances carry enormous power to comfort and uplift. I am the fortunate recipient of hundreds of these attentions, and they have delighted me again and again. I can’t thank these people enough for making the effort.

This may be the greatest lesson of all from the summer: that our efforts to serve others in even the smallest ways can make profound and lasting impressions and deep impact. Buddhists would call this effort compassion, Christians might call it charity (in the Bible it is translated from the Greek as “lovingkindess”), and I think the Hebrew term “mitzvah” describes acts of kindness like these, although there may be a better Jewish term for this act.

Whatever the name, kindness to those in need is a fundmantal principle of organized religions and is a basic human need.

I welcome any comments here that describe kind acts that have been offered to you this summer.

What I’m finding as we deal with a loss in the family is that our personal strengths have been amplified. I am fundamentally optimistic and forward looking, and that has never been more true than now. It is the only way I know how to find the determination to press on. There is really nothing else to do.

I think that is the mental trick, or demand. I can’t afford to live with the saddest part of loss for too long at one time. For starters, I want to be part of a legacy we can all be proud of.

When I was 20, one of my friends, a talented, vivacious woman named Maryann, died in an accident. After the funeral, her father, a profoundly wise and compassionate man, gathered her friends together and said, “I want to ask you to do one thing for me. Whenever you have the chance–for the rest of your lives–to do something great, or not to, choose to do something great. Remember that Maryann won’t have the chance. If all of you do this, I will have the comfort of knowing that dozens of people are doing more than they otherwise would.”

I haven’t always lived up to that advice, but I’ve never forgotten it. That’s how I think of loss now: the best way to honor someone we love is to do the most we can to honor their life.

David Brooks of the New York Times, wrote this in his column today, which explained why Catholic “quasi-believers” are so successful in our society:

For there are at least two things we know about flourishing in a modern society.

First, college students who attend religious services regularly do better than those that don’t. As Margarita Mooney, a Princeton sociologist, has demonstrated in her research, they work harder and are more engaged with campus life. Second, students who come from denominations that encourage dissent are more successful, on average, than students from denominations that don’t.

This embodies the social gospel annex to the quasi-religious creed: Always try to be the least believing member of one of the more observant sects. Participate in organized religion, but be a friendly dissident inside. Ensconce yourself in traditional moral practice, but champion piecemeal modernization. Submit to the wisdom of the ages, but with one eye open.

One eye open. It’s an interesting notion, and it may well be that this recipe predicts success in our society right now. But it only rings true for me if by “one eye open,” you mean that you are looking to supplement the wisdom that one tradition teaches you with additional wisdom.

I prefer belief to skepticism. My belief in a powerful God has often been the only reassurance that got me up and out of bed in the morning. Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and waited for enlightenment. He wasn’t evaluating options; he was looking for an answer to explain human suffering. As far as suffering goes, I believe that God doesn’t bring it to us.

I don’t have all the answers, but I don’t feel the need to keep one eye on the possibility that God has suffering in the works for us. It’s a better world if he doesn’t.