A dear friend recently had a terrible accident. She was doing an inversion on her pull-up bar when the bar detached from the ceiling. She crashed hard to the floor. Because there was no mat down to break her fall, she broke her back in several places and fractured her skull. In the blink of her eye, her life changed. Astonishingly, she didn’t damage her spinal cord even though she’d gotten up to walk, not realizing her back was broken. (Clearly, she’s stoic and can deal with a lot of pain.)
She’s now facing a long, painful recovery and is understandably daunted by it. But she also knows how close she came to losing her ability to walk, and she’s grateful that she’s not more injured. She told me, “I try not to think about what could have happened; it’s just too overwhelming. I’m very lucky.”
We talked the other day about how this experience will certainly change her. Having to deal with the physical pain would be more than enough for her to handle over the next few months. But with physical trauma also comes psychological challenges. She now celebrates victories that two weeks ago would have felt absurd: being able to walk ½ a block or walking up the front steps to her house. When she regains her full strength, which probably won’t be for 6 months, she won’t look at skiing, running, biking or rock climbing the same way again. She will have a changed relationship with her body. No doubt she will also experience a shifting sense of who she is in the world. Traumatic events change us and oftentimes the people around us, too.
I was shaken by the enormity of her injury and how quickly it happened. I’ve also been worried about her and sad as I ponder how long it will take her to recover. But something unexpected also happened to me; I feel a new urgency and clarity in my own life. I’ve always been someone who wants to suck the marrow out of life, and my personality tends towards optimism; that hasn’t changed. What has changed is that I’ve realized that I really don’t know how long I’ll have on this earth. (Of course, we all know this on some level, but we resist thinking about it too deeply because it’s awfully scary.) In the last week I’ve felt a shift in my thinking–or perhaps it’s more like a new resolve. I must fully dive into what I’m called to do now because in a blink of an eye everything might change. And for me to do the work I’m called to do, and be successful at it, I need to concentrate on the positive.
When I have moments of insight like this, I often turn to the work of Dr. Martin Seligman, who’s often referred to as the “Father of Positive Psychology.” Seligman directs the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center. His research focuses on theories of learned helplessness, depression, resilience, optimism, pessimism and positive psychology. In his 1991 book, Learned Optimism, Seligman wrote,
“The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case.”
It would be fairly easy for my injured friend to dwell on the fact that she didn’t put a mat under her pull-up bar. Or that she didn’t have an experienced carpenter check out her installation of the bar before she used it. She will have an easier recovery–psychologically and emotionally–by accepting that bad things sometimes happen to good people. This is a temporary (albeit painful) setback, not an indication that bad luck will continue to rain down on her.
Even optimists like myself can use reminders to dwell in gratitude. I recently learned of a daily practice developed by Seligman that’s been shown to increase happiness and feelings of satisfaction. It’s called “Three Good Things,” and I’m going to start doing this short exercise each evening before bed. It doesn’t take that much time, and it shifts my thinking into a positive frame of mind before I close out my day.
I’m going to do this exercise every day for at least one week, hopefully two. I’ll write down three things that went well for me on that day and explain why I think they went well. They can be small things: my coworker surprised me by bringing me a latte. Or they can be large things: I finished a really big, important project and my colleagues praised my work. The important thing is to include as much detail about the events as possible, including an explanation for why I think this event came to pass.
Why do this? We all tend to take for granted the good things and the kind people in our lives. We don’t mean to overlook them, but we often do. They just become such an expected part of our everyday lives that we forget that these people and events add beauty and meaning to our days. When we forget to be grateful for the warmth of the woodstove or the steamy cup of coffee that someone made for us–we miss many simple but rich moments of connection
By focusing my attention on being grateful and allowing myself to dwell in possibility, I’m happier and more content. I’m also a much more effective leader and public servant becuase I have more energy and belief in my ability to get things done. I told this to my friend who’s slowly healing from her nasty back injury. She said that knowing I can make a positive shift in my thinking because of what happened to her somehow makes her journey a little easier.