by Amy Newmark
This is too hard, said my brain. Just turn around now and try again next year after you’ve better prepared yourself. You’ll never make it.
“Yes, I will,” I muttered as Uncle Bill stopped to take a picture.
I stared at the view. My husband had been right; it was amazing.
This is good enough. If you keep going, you won’t be able to make it back down. You’re too fat.
I was close to tears. The summit seemed so far away. Everything hurt, and I felt way out of my league. You’ll never make it.
I forced my sore feet to walk and started up the trail. “Yes, I will.”
As we neared the top, the switchbacks became shorter and steeper. I found myself grabbing onto trees to steady myself as I fought for breath. Stop now, or they will be carrying you down the mountain on a stretcher. You can’t do this.
“Yes, I can,” I said loudly, causing my dad to turn and look at me. I gave him a halfhearted wave, praying he wouldn’t see my tears and make me stop.
I continued to repeat, Yes, I will, in my head with every step, too tired to say the words out loud, and refusing to let any more negative thoughts infiltrate my mind. My tears flowed freely as I pushed myself beyond exhaustion.
Yes, I will. Yes, I will. Yes, I will.
I only allowed myself to look a few feet ahead, concentrating only on what was immediately before me. I continued my mantra with every painful step.
Yes, I will. Yes, I will. Yes, I will.
When I heard cheers from my husband, cousin, and her kids, I finally gave myself permission to look up. I had made it to the summit. My tears of exhaustion were replaced with tears of joy and relief.
I scrambled to the very top and sat down to take in the view at 8,123 feet. I tried to organize my thoughts, but all I could think was, Yes, I did.
— Jennifer McMurrain —
Seeing with Your Heart
The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.
~Robert F. Kennedy
It was a beautiful Southern California morning, complete with blue sky, a cool breeze and warm sunlight. I walked through the parking lot of the shopping plaza thinking of little else than my rendezvous with a pecan roll at the local bakery. As I strolled in front of the grocery store adjacent to the bakeshop, I noticed a young woman standing next to the store entrance with bags of groceries neatly stacked. As is my practice with strangers, I made eye contact with her and said with a smile, “Hello, there! And how are you today?”
She smiled back and responded with a Southern accent, “I’m fine, sir. How are you?”
“I’m doing well, thank you!”
I had only taken a few steps past her when I heard her say, “Thank you for seeing me!”
Her words brought me to a stop. Still smiling, I turned around and walked over to her, extending my hand. “My name’s Mark. What’s yours?”
For the next twenty minutes, I listened with rapt attention to Dominique share her story. She had grown up in Louisiana where her mother and sisters still lived. Three years ago, a family tragedy prompted her to make the move to California, where without contacts or the promise of employment, she had managed to create a life of purpose and fulfillment. She spoke with an easy Southern charm and a smile that radiated joy.
A car pulled up to the curb. Dominique introduced me to the driver, a friend of hers. I helped her load the groceries into the back seat. She thanked me and opened the front passenger-side door. “My daddy used to say that a person will remember how you made them feel long after they’ve forgotten what you said. I know I’ll remember this for a long time.” I smiled, knowing I would as well. The car drove away, but I stood there for a moment longer before stepping inside the bakery.
Sipping my coffee, with the remnants of a pecan roll on my plate, I looked around the bakery at the people there. I nodded to the regulars sitting at their favorite tables, some reading the daily newspaper, others on their laptops. Business types hurried to the counter to pick up the orders they had phoned in. I smiled while thinking about what I had just experienced with Dominique — two strangers who had made a connection based on nothing more than shared humanity.
Every person has a story to tell if we’re willing to take the time to listen. Greeting a stranger with a smile and a kind word is a very small thing to do and yet can have a profound effect on both people. One of my favorite quotes is from Mother Teresa: “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.” I have found that the benefit of doing these small things not only helps me maintain a positive outlook on life, but may even sow a few seeds of hope for someone else.
Perhaps I’m ascribing too much significance to the potential of what a simple “hello” between two strangers can do. Certainly, not all of my encounters are as dramatic as the one I shared with Dominique. And yet, I cannot shy away from doing it simply because I don’t know how the other person might react. I have done this hundreds of times over the past few years, and it has never been met with anything other than a positive response.
When I share with others what I do and encourage them to give it a try, I’m usually met with comments like, “Well, that’s easy for you, Mark. You’re an outgoing person.” At that point, I assure them that I am anything but outgoing. Yes, it has become easier over the years, but I still have to make a conscious effort to do it.
When somebody steps up beside me at the self-serve coffee for a refill, rather than turn to them and say, “Hello! How are you doing today?” my natural inclination is to remain silent and mind my own business.
Dominique’s words, “Thank you for seeing me,” reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend just a week prior. He and I were sharing our perceptions on how technology is redefining human relationships. Social media is creating a society where we are becoming more connected, but less relational — a society where we can all be alone… together. We are in danger of losing the ability to have real conversations.
“Thank you for seeing me!”
Don’t get me wrong. I always enjoy reading a text from my wife or daughter that says, “Thinking of you. Love you.” I’m on Facebook and find it useful to keep tabs on what’s going on with my friends. (I especially appreciate the birthday notifications.) But no number of texts, tweets or Facebook posts will ever amount to having a real conversation with another person. A person can be inundated with electronic communication and still feel alone. People have a need to be seen. A need to be heard. A need to be treated as if they matter. Because they do.
One particular restaurant chain understands this. New employees are required to watch a short, three-minute customer-training video that captures a few minutes of activity inside one of their restaurants. A simple, instrumental soundtrack with captions appears whenever the camera focuses on an actor portraying either a customer or staff member. Each caption gives a brief description of one aspect of that person’s life at that moment before moving on to the next person.
The snippets of information cover the spectrum, from joyful and celebratory to somber and even heart wrenching. One caption for an older male customer reads: “After years of battling cancer, he is finally free of the disease.” Another one for a female staff member reads: “Worked hard through high school, was accepted to the college of her dreams.” Still another for an elderly woman sitting by herself in a booth reads: “Husband died one month ago. Today would have been their fiftieth anniversary.”
It doesn’t take much to brighten the day of a stranger. To smile. To offer a friendly greeting. To engage in a brief conversation. To see someone. And it makes me feel so good.
So don’t be surprised if one day a bespectacled, white-haired man walks up to you smiling and says, “Hello, there! And how are you doing today?” It might just be me!
— Mark Mason —
Just Start
There is something magical about running; after a certain distance, it transcends the body.
Then a bit farthe
r, it transcends the mind.
~Kristin Armstrong
I was standing in my family room in my running clothes, struggling with an armband that was supposed to hold my iPhone. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could pay someone to exercise for us, and the calories would still magically disappear from our bodies?” I said.
My husband looked at me as if I were nuts.
“That would be cheating.”
“Yes and no,” I replied. “We’d still be paying for a legitimate service, but we wouldn’t have to suffer the hard work of doing it ourselves, or the consequences.”
“Like losing weight and being healthy?”
“Well, yeah, now that you mention it….”
To me, running was the worst thing in the world. Running was for athletes or people who liked to hurt themselves. Running was for anyone but me.
“Hon,” he said, “that’s how you and I both got into this mess.”
I nodded, fiddled with my armband again and gave up. It would be annoying regardless of how the phone sat on my arm. I needed it to listen to music, to distract myself from how much this was going to hurt.
I also needed it so I could hear the computer voice of my mile tracker telling me how much closer I would be to dying with every passing mile.
There is some exaggeration in this description, but not much. I wasn’t getting any younger. And the pounds weren’t exactly disappearing as I ate what I wanted and hoped for the best. Said pounds were slowly creeping to my thighs and backside. Actually, they were creeping everywhere. As my doctor put it, “I think it may be time to put some exercise into your schedule.”
My only hope for combating age would be with exercise. So here I was about to embark on the very thing I disliked.
“Hon,” my husband said again, interrupting my thoughts, “it really won’t be so bad. You just have to get started.”
I smirked at him. “Right,” I said as he continued to eat breakfast and relaxed deeper into the soft folds of the leather sofa. His time will come, I thought. His time will come.
Meanwhile, my time was right in front of my nose. I had to just do it… and try to make it back alive. “If you don’t hear from me in a half-hour, come look for me. I could be on the side of the road… dead.”
My husband didn’t even look at me. Instead, he took a sip of his coffee while watching the weather forecast and said, “You’ll do great!”
It was dark and cold outside but I wasn’t going to turn back. I needed to run for my health. I needed to run for my family’s health. I needed to run so I could get back to drinking a nice hot cup of coffee.
I fired up the music and my running tracker, and began to run.
The air was obscenely crisp, and I could hear my thighs squishing together as I lumbered along. But in a matter of minutes the air became less crisp and I found a steady rhythm. The music was loud and it was working. I was running… I was actually doing it!
I replayed my husband’s words as I smelled the morning air, thick with apple blossoms. “You just have to get started.” By golly, the man was right. And not only was he right, but the concept was applicable to nearly everything around me.
Getting started was the sticking point of all the good things in life. I even said those words to my kids when they didn’t want to do their homework. The sooner they started, the sooner it would be over. And all they had to do to get there was to start!
But it took me taking my own advice — and my husband’s reminding — that this was true for me, too. From starting a diet to a new running program — heck, it was how I got out of bed every day. I just had to start!
Getting started was the sticking point of all the good things in life.
I did make it home that morning. I didn’t die, and my husband didn’t find me lying on the side of the road. Years later, I’m still running and I still don’t like it. My lungs still scream for mercy and my legs get a workout that shouldn’t even be possible with this many years under my belt, but they do.
I wasn’t made for running, but I became a person made to run.
Something good comes from challenges if we’re willing to look at them from an alternate point of view. For me, this view involves feet hitting the pavement and watching blind corners in the early morning darkness so I don’t trip and fall on my face.
Running changed my health, and it changed every facet of my life. I don’t have to like it, but getting up early and starting my day doing something that isn’t easy makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something huge.
Starting may be the hardest part, but starting is also the way to achieving everything we want.
And that is something I can run circles around any day.
— Heather Spiva —
The Power of Attitude
A New Way of Thinking Big
Each time we face our fear, we gain strength, courage, and confidence in the doing.
~Theodore Roosevelt
If anyone had listened in on my thoughts during the first few weeks of my community college Introduction to Business class, they would have heard, What if my answer is wrong? I’ll look like such an idiot. The teacher will hate me. My classmates will hate me. I’ll end up wasting everybody’s time. I’d better not mess this up.
Add in a bit of nervous knee knocking and the intense desire to hide — or, at the very least, to start nibbling my fingernails down to the quick — and they’d have the entire picture.
You see, my professor was a retired criminal lawyer, and he had a unique way of going over the answers to our class’s weekly quizzes. For each question, he would call on a random student and ask for their answer. Then he would proceed to grill the student mercilessly, forcing him or her to defend that answer — after which he’d ask the class to vote on whether they agreed, or whether they believed that the hapless student was “full of sh*t.” If the latter, a new student was picked to give a different answer, and the whole process would begin again.
It was certainly a memorable way to review, and if I’d been a more experienced student, it probably wouldn’t have thrown me. But I was just a freshman, and quiz-review days terrified me. I’d spend the entire review shrinking in my seat, praying that I wouldn’t be called on.
One of my other professors saved me. In my anatomy class, we watched a TED Talk by Dr. Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist who had studied how body language affects self-confidence. Dr. Cuddy explained that humans could choose to take either “high power” or “low power” positions with their bodies. “High power” positions involve taking up as much space as possible — standing up straight, squaring your shoulders, and moving your arms and legs away from your trunk so that you look as big as you possibly can. “Low power” poses, in contrast, involve making yourself look small: tucking your head and rounding your shoulders, and keeping your arms and legs crossed and held close.
Not surprisingly, people tend to see others who habitually adopt high power poses as natural leaders, and are more willing to hire them for jobs and otherwise give them their trust. But the truly revolutionary portion of Dr. Cuddy’s research was not the effect of high-powered body language on others; it was the effect it had on the person taking the poses. She found that spending just two minutes standing in a high power pose measurably increased a person’s feelings of power and self-confidence. And she wanted all of her viewers to try it out for themselves.
“Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this,” she encouraged.
So I did.
I arrived ten minutes early to class on the next quiz-review day, just as I always had. However, instead of hunching over my book studying quietly while I waited for class to begin, I tried something new. I sat up straight and spread my feet out wide underneath the table. I spread out my books and notebooks, too, using the entire surface of my desk. When my classmates started trickling in, I smiled at them and said, “Good morning,” instead of hiding behind my phone. And when our teacher arrived and asked
if anyone had any questions about the material before we began our quiz review, I actually raised my hand — not with the tiny, elbow-on-table-and-hand-at-chest-level gesture I usually made, but by throwing my arm up straight and high.
“I am big,” I told myself. “I am strong. It is all right to be seen and take up space.”
The effect of this was astounding.
My professor answered my question calmly and politely, as if he were talking to a colleague. There was none of the belittling language he sometimes used. But even more important was the way my inner dialogue had changed. When the review started, instead of thinking, Oh gosh, oh gosh, oh gosh, what if I get this answer wrong? I had a revolutionary new thought instead: Well, so what if I am wrong? A wonderful feeling of calm descended over me. Suddenly, I realized that the important thing was simply that I was participating. I didn’t need to be right. I just needed to engage fully in the class and learn, like everyone else.
Now, this was an attitude many people, including my parents and my best friend, had often tried to communicate to me before. It had never really sunk in. But something about taking the “high power” pose made the same thoughts come, not from someone talking outside of me, but from the inside of my very own brain. And the feeling of peace that came with it was incredible.
Eventually, I earned an A in that class, but the real success was in finding that sense of peace. Today, every time I need to make a presentation or take a test, I spend a few minutes “thinking big” — giving myself permission to take up space and be seen, to stand up tall and strong. It never fails to calm me down and help me to know in my bones that it really is okay just to be present and do my best. And when I do, my best always turns out to be pretty darn good.
— Kerrie R. Barney —
Biking to Life
Encourage, lift and strengthen one another. For the positive energy spread to one will be felt by us all.
