Practice
Put your happiness to work in the lives of others. Learn about things you can do, and that others are doing, to make the world a happier place.
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Helping Hands Together
One day while walking our dog, my 6-year-old son suggested we clean up a wooded area full of Styrofoam cups, newsprint and other unsavory items near our home. We organized a few other families for a work party on a warm sunny morning; the dozen kids involved wore gloves, filled plastic bags and called for help when they stumbled on broken glass or syringes.Make helping a habitIn just a few hours we cleared the entire area, filling the back of my truck with bags for the dump. Before leaving, one parent asked if I’d organize something similar every month—she wanted her kids to get used to helping out the community.Getting into a pattern of volunteerism during the busy years of kids and work commitments may seem like one more thing you don’t have time for. But making community service a priority for the whole family can have lasting benefits.Mayo Clinic research from 2009 found people who volunteer live longer than those who don’t. Putting in 40 to 100 hours a year, just one or two hours a week, is enough to make a difference. More recently, the American Heart Association journal, Stroke, reports that a purposeful life—including volunteering—can protect against blockages in the brain, dementia and even death.A family affair“To make volunteering a part of my life, it has to be a part of the family's life,” says Liz Demke, a married mom with two children from Sandy, Utah.“My kids can hear about things I do, but if they do them with me, they get the same experience and they want to do it again.”A long-term relationship between your family and a particular organization, rather than a one-time project, can be particularly powerful. The Demke family has interacted with a domestic abuse home in its community for many years. “We have loved bringing dinner a couple of times a year to the family shelter,” Liz says.“It is a very humbling experience to see complete families that look exactly like ours, staying in a shelter and lining up for you to feed them.My kids talk about it for weeks every time we go.”Some communities have created websites where volunteer opportunities are listed and organized specifically for families. In Austin, Texas, Marissa Vogel was so frustrated with the challenge of finding ways for her children to get involved that she started Little Helping Hands. Now volunteers can search a calendar of events, create specific family friendly occasions and find requests from different organizations.Make it personalFor the Crosby family of Cumming, Georgia, diabetes related events are a given. One of their four kids has Type 1 diabetes, so raising money for the cause has personal relevance. In Anchorage, Alaska, McCormack family members focus their volunteering on outdoor activities, like a yearly cleanup of Campbell Creek. They spend lots of time camping, hiking and fishing, so helping maintain the things they care about makes sense.To make volunteering part of your family culture, doing is always more powerful than just saying; telling your children that every life has value means a lot more when you together help provide socks or underwear for the homeless."If you want to start getting involved in volunteering but aren’t sure your kids will be on board, Liz suggests you “think of a few options and talk about them with your kids. Let them be a part of the discussion so they are motivated to help.” That might mean letting them figure out a category of service: children, elderly, environmental, etc.It is also important to prepare before going into a new situation where you may encounter circumstances different from day-to-day life. If your children are animal lovers, a visit to a shelter can be upsetting with so many lonely creatures. Talk to them beforehand about what you’ll see, potential difficulties, and what you will actually be doing. A conversation on the way home doesn’t have to be heavy handed or preachy but you do want to answer any questions your children might have.Check sites such as the national database Idealist (idealist.org) or Volunteer Match (volunteermatch.org) to find volunteer opportunities near you.Eliana Osborn is a mother of two living in the Southwest. She teaches at Arizona Western College and works as a freelance writer specializing in education and family issues.
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Lava Mae Gives Homeless a Fresh Start
Doniece Sandoval is in branding and marketing, yet her mobile-shower organization, Lava Mae, puts her squarely in the transformation business. She aims to provide her clients, the homeless San Franciscans who board her two retrofitted city buses for 15-minute showers, with the best possible experience under the circumstances.
You see one person go in and a totally different person come out, because they’ve washed away not only the dirt and the grime, but the symbolic feeling of unworthiness,” Doniece says. “They reconnect with a sense of dignity, humanity.”
San Francisco has an estimated homeless population of up to 7,300 and fewer than a dozen places where they can shower. Most of the shower facilities have only one or two stalls and limited days and hours of use. Doniece partnered with government and civic organizations and businesses to launch the first bus in June 2014. A little over a year later, she added another bus and plans for two more by the end of this year. Her goal is to provide 50,000 showers each year, helping to fill the growing need in a city with the highest rental prices in the nation.
A beautiful feeling
Recently Lava Mae served a 94-year-old woman who had been evicted from her apartment. Quite a few clients have jobs and are living out of their cars. The one thing they share is gratitude, something Doniece finds humbling. “They come out, and they are just like ‘Thank you’ or ‘That was beautiful,’ ” she says.
“Watching the impact that Lava Mae has on those we serve brings up so many emotions for me: pride in what we’ve created, happiness as I watch people emerge with huge smiles and a sense of peace from their showers, and sadness as I know that they’re going back to their life on the street for however long that lasts. It’s driven home for me how fortunate I am and deepened my commitment to doing more.”
Go to lavamae.org for more information.
Katya Cengel reports from around the world and teaches journalism at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, National Geographic and Foreign Policy.
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Happiness of the Holiday Table
There are a few things you can always count on during family holidays: kids showing up a foot taller since last you’ve seen them; Aunt Lisa nailing the perfect sweet-potato-to-marshmallow ratio in her signature dish; and roof-raising joyful chaos that leaves you flopped out on the couch once everyone hits the road.And there’s another part of families’ gatherings that’s taken so for granted that we don’t even think about it: the tales that get retold so often that they become part of the very fabric of your family’s identity. But these stories aren’t just idle ways to fill the silence between forkfuls—they serve a real purpose in making our lives richer and more meaningful.Family narratives bring us togetherRobyn Fivush, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Emory University in Atlanta, studies family narratives. These reminiscences contribute to a young person’s formation of her identity and her understanding of her place in the world, Robyn says. For older people, sharing family stories allows them to satisfy what psychologist Erik Erikson termed generativity, or the desire to impart your wisdom and legacy to the next generations. “There is some anthropological and sociological research that suggests that these kinds of stories become kind of a family motif,” says Robyn, “like ‘We’re a lucky family’ or ‘We’re a family that struggles but overcomes.’ ”What that means, says William Dunlop, Ph.D., a University of California, Riverside, assistant professor who studies personal narratives, is that these stories can affect a person’s entire worldview. A listener comes away with a sense of collective identity. “These stories say, ‘This is my kind of family,’ ” Will says.Holiday sharingWhile holiday time is not the only time family lore gets shared—car trips, dinners and other less formal moments are terrific opportunities to recount and listen—the gatherings offer a unique opportunity. “The thing about a holiday is it’s a chance to ask questions that a lot of different people might have answers to,” says Linda Coffin, the executive director of the Association of Personal Historians, an organization that encourages the preserving and sharing of people’s life stories.“If you ask your mom about crazy Uncle Harold she’ll have her perspective, but with 12 people at Christmas, you’ll get a lot of different perspectives.” You come away with a richer, more three-dimensional picture of your family’s history and the people who formed it.Read more about how family stories enrich our lives.A hero in the familyThere are many other life-enriching benefits to family stories, perhaps the most overt of which is imparting values to young people. “Sometimes they’re moral stories, or admonitions or warnings—what not to do,” says Marshall Duke, Ph.D., Robyn’s Emory colleague who also studies family narratives. Other times, they’re stories of what Marshall calls heroism. “In this case, heroism is doing something the listener thinks he would never do, such as picking up and leaving Europe and going to a new country, or overcoming some political and social obstacles.”The idea that you are part of a group of people who are capable of such heroism—which almost everyone in a nation of immigrants is—is a source of pride to people of any age, but especially to teens and children. In his research, says Marshall, “we’ve found that heroic stories give strength to kids. The fact that they are related to someone who did this, it becomes ‘That’s what we do in our family, our family rises above.’ It teaches resiliency.”A story worth retellingStories of her mother’s heroism had a big impact on Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua, 52. Her mother, Tamar Fromer, was a soldier in the Israeli underground. Marisa heard again and again how Tamar fled Poland alone at age 13 to Palestine, which was then under British governance before the state of Israel was established, just before World War II. “My mother told me how she and other girls smuggled [goods past the gates] in Jerusalem” to aid the Israeli statehood movement, Marisa recalls. The British guarding the city were too formal and polite to check women, Tamar recounted. “She’d just walk by with this big innocent smile on her face.”Tamar also told her daughter of the pain of leaving her mother behind in Poland, where she died in the Holocaust. “Growing up with that story—you, too, can be severed from your mother—filled me with a lot of anxiety as a kid,” Marisa says. “But I think what she was trying to tell me was that you can’t walk through life with fear—you get over whatever it is that you’re afraid of, that you must adjust, that life is random and you have to make the best of it.” And while Marisa knew her mother as a homemaker, not a soldier, “I learned from her stories that girls can do anything,” she says, and that breaking the rules for a worthy cause was an admirable thing to do.The past is prologueTales of events that took place before we were born don’t just help people understand their places in their families but also the families’ places in the larger world. “Because by listening you are now included in these stories, they become part of your history,” Will says. And especially when the story is being told by an older person to a younger person, the listener experiences what Marshall calls an “extension of the self.”“When a 10-year-old knows about how his grandparents lived 60 years ago he feels a part of something that has been going on longer than he’s been around.” He is woven into an ongoing family narrative and on some level may feel a responsibility as a participant in the story, which, says Marshall, can help guide his choices in the future. The child, says Will, “is aware that his behavior affects the family in a broad sense.” CJ McKiernan, 48, of Somerville, Massachusetts, says she grew up hearing her dad tell a story about his own father that, while primarily humorous, nonetheless had a strong message about what was expected in their family.“When my dad was young, he ran out of money in California and so he called my grandfather for help. Grandpa says, ‘They have buses, don’t they?’ ” she says. “So my dad takes a nine-day bus trip back to Massachusetts from California and finally arrives all dirty and tired and calls his father from the bus station to pick him up. Grandpa says, ‘They have buses, don’t they?’ It was rush hour and he wasn’t about to go pick him up at the station.” The moral of the story, CJ says, is “You are responsible for your own mistakes—your family is not going let you get hurt but if you do something idiotic, you take responsibility for yourself.”Read more: 33 Ideas on FamilyBut these family stories, experts say, do not have to be positive, funny or even have a happy ending to confer the same benefits of family identity and values on the people hearing them. In Marshall and Robyn’s research, adolescents who knew many details about happy and unhappy aspects of family history tended to have higher levels of self esteem, lower levels of anxiety, fewer behavioral problems and greater resilience. “They learn that bad things happen to good people, and we can overcome obstacles,” Marshall says.They also learn that failure is not the end of the world. “Sometimes you work as hard as you possibly can and things still don’t come out well—it helps people accept that there are times like that.” The stories don’t even need to be true to bring the good stuff. In fact, says Marshall, they are often hardly true at all. “They have a certain ‘truthiness’ about them, as [Stephen] Colbert would say. They’re often embellished or the edges are softened.”The joy of storytellingMarisa and CJ both took away valuable lessons from their parents’ stories, but the upsides of family storytelling aren’t just to the listeners—the teller, too, gains a sense of meaning, which is often tied to generativity. Northwestern University narrative researcher and psychologist Dan McAdams and his colleagues have been studying storytelling and generativity for decades.“Generativity,” he writes, “is an adult’s concern for, and commitment to promoting the well-being of future generations through…a wide range of endeavors aimed at leaving a positive legacy for the future.” “It’s kind of like, ‘I’ve gotten me figured out, now what am I going to give back to the world?" Robin explains.Dan’s research reveals that highly generative people find happiness in telling these stories. “Not everyone achieves that generativity, but those that do report higher levels of life satisfaction and a sense of meaning and purpose,” Robyn says. People who are more generative, Dan’s research shows, also report telling more of these family stories, particularly ones with the themes of suffering, growth and human kindness.Linda, who helps clients put their life stories into book form to give to their loved ones, has seen what telling personal narratives can do for her clients. “In sharing these stories, people get a sense that they’re passing on something that’s significant in a way that’s not always true of an estate that consists of things,” she says.“It’s a personal legacy that they’re passing on.” Even if an older person is not particularly concerned about the next generation or needs to be coaxed to tell their story, “I find that people who tell their own stories have a sense of looking back through their lives and feeling a sense of accomplishment,” Linda says. “Like, wow, you know, I’ve had a life! Even if they didn’t do something ‘big,’ ” she says.The tales that bondIn some families, stories are sheer entertainment, and the ritual and repetition of the same stories—with the same sometimes corny punch lines that families recite in unison—are what binds members together, even more than the specific content. One family classic of CJ’s is the tale of how her dad got lost driving to Logan airport. “Oftentimes the whole story won’t get told, because we’ve already heard it. It’ll be just one sentence, and it’s like hearing the whole story,” she says.“Whenever there’s mention of someone getting lost while driving, we say, ‘You gotta go into New Hampshire to turn around,’ ” CJ says. “It’s the same joke over and over again, and the four of us think it’s funny. I’m sure it’s not as funny to other people, but it binds us together as a family.”Of course, not all families have delightful (or even hilarious-in-retrospect) memories to share and some family gatherings are strained, but the stories we tell in those circumstances can also serve a positive purpose.Sharing makes it hurt lessSiblings sharing gallows humor about a difficult parent, for example, is healthy and positive and bonds them together in a different way. “These stories cement the relationships,” Will says. “Nothing is better than not feeling alone. It doesn’t make the stories less terrible, but it does make you feel less isolated.”What’s more, if a sad story is told during the holidays, around food and gifts and loved ones, the message is, “This terrible thing happened in our family history, but look how nice everything is now,” Marshall says. “Things pass and people overcome.” So don’t worry if it appears that the younger folks in your family aren’t obviously enthralled with your anecdotes that illustrate your years of accrued wisdom.“You just want to put the story out there,” Marshall says. When your kids are adults and you hear them repeating your meaningful stories to their own children, you can sit back, enjoy Aunt Lisa’s sweet potatoes, and know that what you said did, in fact, make a difference.
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The Gift That Changed My Life
Some gifts offer effervescent delights, lasting no longer than the bubbles in a glass of champagne. Others—a cashmere sweater, a handbag—provide pleasure for a season or two. More durable gifts, like jewelry, are an everlasting reminder of friendship and love. And then there are those rare gifts that alter the courses of our lives. They transform the way we see ourselves, leading us to pursue dreams, ambitions and daily happiness in radically new ways. Below, 10 people share the gifts that changed their lives.
Emily Wise Miller
Dallas, Texas
Live Happy web editor
GIFT: BICYCLE
Two years ago, surgeons opened my sternum, stopped my heart and replaced a faulty aortic valve with a mechanical one. Before this surgery, I’d been pretty active: running, doing yoga, training with weights. During the recovery, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck; I couldn’t cook, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t even reach for a bottle of milk on a high shelf. After a couple of months, I felt well enough to go on walks and short, easy hikes. It would be another six months before I could do yoga and almost a year before I returned to running and weights.
Even then, a deep sense of fatigue persisted. I could barely go half a day without napping. Then, in February 2014, after years of working freelance, I joined Live Happy as the web editor. I was thrilled, but the added stress of starting a new job gave me less time for exercise. I gained weight and developed lower back pain and even high blood pressure.
I knew something had to change. Once I started seeing a trainer and exercising again, I began daydreaming about the years my husband and I lived in Florence and traveled everywhere by bicycle. There is nothing like the feeling of riding across the Piazza della Signoria at night, almost empty except for the towering replica of Michelangelo’s David. My husband and I would look at each other on our one-speeds thinking, “We’ll never see or feel anything like this again.”
For my birthday last March, my mother bought me a bicycle—a silver hybrid Trek small enough for my 5-foot frame. It was cute, cool and sporty. I was ecstatic! At first I just rode around the neighborhood with my kids. Then I moved on to nearby trails. Soon I was riding seven miles, then 10 and 15. I was hooked on the feeling of being on a bike. It’s both meditative and fun, a kind of energetic flow state. I began pushing myself in ways that I never had, even before surgery.
Now, two or three mornings a week, I go for 20-mile rides, traversing the urban creeks and forests of Dallas while the city is still half-asleep. The gift of a bicycle pulled me out of my a negative spiral. When I get back from a 20- or 30-mile ride, I feel competent and strong, happy and free.
Listen to Emily discuss her bike and how it affected her life on our podcast, HERE!
Chandra Yarter
San Antonio, Texas
Wedding photographer
GIFT: CAMERA
My grandpa has always been the unofficial family photographer, and every week from the time I was 6 or 7 until my grandfather passed away when I was 16, I’d go with him to the local Kodak store to get his film developed. When I was 8, my grandparents bought me a camera—a small, wind-up Fuji.
From the moment I got it, that camera was strapped to my hip. I’d take it to school, to the grocery store, to the playground. I’d take pictures of everything: my dog, my two sisters—we’re identical triplets—coke bottles. I got pretty good at taking photos, and when people started offering to pay for my services, I began thinking that maybe I could turn something I love into a career.
Today, I have my own business as a wedding photographer. I shoot with a fancy top-of-the-line Canon these days, but it all began with that Fuji.
Heather Rae Johnson
Oakland, California
Journalist
GIFT: RED VELVET CHAIR
In 1995, my boyfriend, John, fell to his death down a freight elevator shaft. That Christmas our friends got together in the apartment that John and Warren, his roommate, had shared. There were about 12 of us. We had gotten each other silly inexpensive gifts, like art deco ashtrays and beer mugs. Since there were so many gifts, we decided that each person would sit in the middle of the living room, blindfolded, while we piled the gifts around them. Then, they’d take off the blindfold and open them all.
My friend Blair and I did a lot of antique store shopping that year. One afternoon I came across a gorgeous red velvet chair. It was $125. I passed it by because I had gifts to buy for others. The next week Blair said, “I went to that same store and your chair was gone.” Sadly, it wasn’t to be.
At the party, it was my turn in the hot seat. When Warren took off the blindfold, there in front of me was a single gift: my pretty red chair! Everyone had pitched in, and Blair had gotten it for me. I cried. After going through something so terrible, losing someone I cared about so much, that little red chair reminded me, and still does, of the value of friendship and how good friends can come together and help each other through the absolute worst.
Judith Viorst
Washington
Author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and many other books
GIFT: FRENCH LESSONS
Back in the late 1960s my husband, Milton, who speaks flawless French, gave me the very expensive gift of a week of total immersion at Berlitz. He was determined to spur me—who spoke zero French, flawless or otherwise—to share his knowledge of this beautiful language.
As I recall it, the course involved five days of private, intensive lessons all day and all in French, with the hope that it would give me a jump-start in learning French, after which I would continue to study in more conventional ways. During that total immersion week I worked harder than I’d ever worked in my life…but, alas, got nowhere. At the end of the course I was called into the Berlitz office. And there I was told, more in sorrow than in anger: “ ‘Madame Viorst, you have remarkable stamina. But’...long pause followed by a sigh...‘no talent for languages.’ ”
Freed by this verdict from my husband’s nagging and from ever having to study French again, I decided that I would concentrate on English, in which I now have written 43 books.
Tom Broecker
New York
Emmy-winning costume designer
for Saturday Night Live
GIFT: MY BOOK ABOUT ME BY ME, MYSELF
I was 6 years old when my father gave me My Book About Me as a Christmas present. I was already drawing a lot, and this book gave me focus. I’d go through the pages and with a bright orange crayon I followed the directions to do things like trace my hands and my feet. I’d pay close paid attention to myself, noticing things like which foot was bigger. There were also pages where you’d write about yourself. I wrote, ‘I am 6. I’m right-handed. I have straight blond hair and a long nose.’ I also kept a list of things I wanted to be when I grew up. My list included plumber, fireman, chef, astronaut and fashion designer.
I was growing up in small-town Indiana with three brothers, a father who was a corporate lawyer and a mom who was a nurse. There weren’t many kids in Carmel, Indiana, who wanted to be a fashion designer, but that book helped me claim my own identity and my own ambitions. I went on to study costume design at the Yale School of Drama. I’ve been the costume designer at Saturday Night Live since it began in 1975. I’ve also been the costume designer for 30 Rock, House of Cards and lots of Broadway and off-Broadway shows.
A few years ago I rescued My Book About Me from my parents’ basement and brought it home to my New York apartment. Every now and then, I look through the pages. As you get older, the self-doubts become louder and louder, but seeing my childhood drawings and notes in that book reconnects me with how filled with possibilities we all are as children. It’s a good reminder that it’s never to late to become what you want to be in life.
Donatella Arpaia
New York
Chef/Partner, Prova
GIFT: AN UMBRELLA ROD
When I was 15, my family was in Puglia, Italy, where we typically spent our summers visiting family. I was sitting in the kitchen watching my Great Aunt Rosa make pasta by hand. This was something I’d seen her do many times, but in this instance she grabbed a thin metal, square-shaped rod out of a drawer. She started twirling it in the dough, making these gorgeous pasta shapes. I had never seen anything like it and asked her what the rod was called and where I could buy one. Aunt Rosa laughed and informed me it was a rod from her mother’s umbrella. She said the square edges made perfect pasta shapes. I continued cooking with her all summer, learning more of her great techniques.
The day we were flying back to America, Aunt Rosa gave me a gift wrapped in simple paper: It was her precious umbrella rod, or rather “pasta maker,” handed down from her mother.
James Strejc
Houston
Pre-schooler
Kayla Hammergren
Boston
Account manager for digital ad agency
GIFT: BONE MARROW
Four-year-old James Strejc will tell you that the best present he ever got was his red Lightning McQueen bicycle. His parents, Stephanie and Nick, would choose another gift: the life-saving bone marrow that was donated by a stranger, Kayla Hammergren, a recent Boston College graduate. “Without Kayla,” Stephanie says, “we might not have this healthy, happy child.”
When James was about 18 months old, he developed a troubling set of symptoms: He stopped eating, would sleep about 20 hours a day and had unexplained bruises. For weeks, doctors said James had just a garden-variety ear infection, but after Nick and Stephanie brought him to the emergency room with a raging fever he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. “It was heartbreaking,” Stephanie says. “We were in pieces.” Treatment would be six rounds of chemotherapy, with a 30-day hospital stay for each round. Nick and Stephanie, who pretty much moved into Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, marveled at their toddler’s resilience.
“Just a couple of days after each treatment,” Stephanie says, “he’d be riding around the hospital on his scooter while Nick and I followed with his IV pole.” Right before his second birthday, James relapsed, with leukemia cells showing up in a brain tumor. He would again need chemotherapy, this time followed by radiation. And if he were to survive, another step was critical: a bone marrow transplant. Neither Nick nor Stephanie, or any of their friends or family who stepped forward as possible donors, turned out to be a match. “We knew we’d have to depend on the grace of a stranger,” Stephanie says.
Meanwhile, Kayla had registered as a bone-marrow donor her sophomore year in college. One of her best friends, Michael, had lost a brother to leukemia, and he was organizing a donor drive for the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation. “I thought ‘What if someone I loved got sick, and there was no one there to help them?’ ” she says.
Five months later, Kayla got a call from Gift of Life. A 2-year-old boy was suffering from acute myeloid leukemia and she was a potential match. A week before Christmas 2013, Kayla was wheeled into a surgical suite at Boston’s Dana Farber Hospital. A few days later, James received her bone marrow.
In April, Kayla met James and his parents at the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation Walk for Life 5K in Boston. “They brought us up on the stage first,” Stephanie says, “and then I saw this young woman in the front of the crowd starting to cry. I nudged my husband and said, ‘That’s her.’ When Kayla came up she gave us all big hugs, and we were all crying happy, grateful tears. James immediately took her hand. He knew she was the someone special who had gotten a big poke and given him something that had made him better.”
Kayla says she’s received a gift every bit as remarkable as the one she gave: “Seeing how happy James and his family are was just the greatest feeling in the world. They’re going to be in my life forever and that brings me amazing joy.”
Read more about people who have found that giving back is the greatest reward.
Danielle Montalvo
Hesperia, California
Founder of talvodesigns.com
GIFT: SEWING MACHINE
I was 22 and shopping for Christmas gifts for my 1-year-old son at Wal-Mart when I saw a Brother sewing machine. I was into collage and scrapbooking—I’d just started teaching a scrapbooking class—and I thought, “Oh, I’d love to learn how to sew.” I bought the sewing machine as a Christmas gift for myself, but a day later, I felt guilty—money was tight—so I returned it. I told my mother about it; saying it was just not the right time for me to be buying things for myself. My then-husband, son and I were staying at my parents’ house that Christmas, and on Christmas Eve a big box appeared under the tree. I knew immediately what it was and my eyes filled with tears.
When I got pregnant at 20 I’d given up a lot of my dreams; this was the first time in a long time I had something that was just mine. Then in 2011, when I was going through a divorce, I started a company making eco-friendly toys for special needs children. It was a way of my regaining the confidence I’d lost and also helping not just myself and my child, but the community.
I’d never really thought of my sewing as much more than a hobby, until it was the only thing I could rely on. A couple of years ago I started a new online store, Talvo Designs, where I sell custom-made bowties—my son loves them!—and handmade men’s grooming products. That first sewing machine gave me a way to express myself; it gave me strength; and it gave me a career.
Michele Tremblay
Philadelphia
Paper sculptor
GIFT: A PAINTING
My mother died at the beginning of my sophomore year in college, and I transferred to Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia so I could commute to school and help my dad take care of my 10-year-old sister. One of the professors who most influenced me was the painter Roger Anliker. When he was teaching us egg tempera painting, he brought in an example of his own work. The painting, called Millay, was a portrait of a young girl looking out a window. It was only about 9½ by 10 inches and the theme was a simple one, but I immediately fell in love with it.
When I graduated a couple of years later, my dad handed me a beautifully wrapped box and inside was Millay. I burst into tears. I moved into a tiny apartment after college, and I remember thinking, “I’m going to wait until I have a really great place to hang this painting.” The painting stayed in the box for two years and then late one night I hung it. Instead of waiting for the perfect time and place I decided that night and that apartment, humble though it may have been, was perfect enough.
Millay hangs in the living room of my home today, and it’s still the most beautiful piece of art in my small collection. More importantly, it taught me how living with art can elevate one’s everyday life. Today, I’m a working paper sculptor, and I seek to help people achieve the same joyful experience that Millay has brought to my family and me for so many years.
Read more: Give Happy
Shelley Levitt, editor at large for Live Happy, is a journalist living in Southern California.
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Positively Coincidental?
We’ve all had those moments; a certain song—and its accompanying memories—has played in our head all day, and when we turn on the radio, it’s on the air. Or a friend we haven’t heard from in years has been on our mind, and suddenly we get an email or phone call from them.In many cases, we’ll write this off as mere coincidence. But Chris Mackey, a clinical and counseling psychologist in Geelong West, Australia, says there can be much more to these unexplained incidents than coincidence. And when it happens on a large and impactful scale—such as something extraordinary happening that supports a recent life-changing decision we’ve made—it moves beyond the notion of a coincidence and becomes synchronicity.More than a coincidence“Synchronicity refers to coincidences that are so uncanny and meaningful that they seem to go beyond chance,” explains Chris, a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society. “Synchronistic experiences can seem so improbable that they lead us to wonder about a mysterious hidden order in the universe. I think synchronicity is often an affirming ‘tick from the universe’ that [lets us know] we are on the right track.”While many view synchronicity as something mystical, Carl Jung was among those who viewed synchronicity as having both scientific and psychological components. The primary attribute of synchronicity is that it is meaningful, and not just what we might call a happy coincidence. Chris described it as something that can potentially enhance one’s sense of engagement, purpose and meaning.Chris has studied the use of synchronicity as it applies to positive psychology and has applied it in a therapeutic setting. His work led to his recently published book, Synchronicity: Empower Your Life With the Gift of Confidence.Acknowledge, cherish synchronistic experiencesChris’ findings show that synchronicity correlates with the PERMA model of well-being, in that it is associated with positive feelings, helps with engagement in our life roles, improves relationships by increasing our sense of connections with others and can help us gain personal meaning from our experiences.“It is often motivating and energizing in a way that supports our accomplishment,” he says. Acknowledging synchronistic experiences can also help us become more aware of them – which often leads to more of these “uncanny coincidences.” In other words, just being aware of synchrony can help invite it into our lives.Write it out“To further appreciate synchronistic experiences, it can help to record them in a journal,” Chris recommends. “As with recording dreams, recording synchronistic experiences can help increase their frequency and intensity.”To better appreciate synchronicity and what it has to teach us, he says it’s important to be open and aware to noticing it in action. Synchronicity often has a mysterious or “numinous” quality to it, and is often accompanied by positive reactions such as a sense of awe and wonder. That can help open our minds—and our hearts—to new experiences and possibilities.Invite in the irrational, cosmic connections“Synchronicity also has a sacred quality, inviting us to wonder about the nature of our lives and existence beyond what is readily obvious or rationally explained,” Chris says. “Appreciating our synchronistic experiences draws on our intuition as we creatively reflect on ourselves, our lives and where we are heading.”Paula Felps is the Science Editor at Live Happy.
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33 Ideas on Family
Of all the aspects that make up a good life—positive emotions, identifiable strengths and purpose—arguably among the most important are those people in our lives who make it all come together.
1 “You don’t have to give birth to someone to have a family.” —Sandra Bullock
2. Read Family Life by Akhil Sharma.
3. Watch Terms of Endearment.
4. Call your parents.
5. Get those iPhone pictures of your kids made into prints!
6. Listen to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver.
7. “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.” – Richard Bach
8. Read Home for Dinner by Anne K. Fishel or visit thefamilydinnerproject.org.
9. Listen to our podcast with Anne K. Fishel here.
9. Watch Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors on NBC.
10. Say “I love you” more often.
11. Trace your genealogy and share the results with relatives.
Read more: Family Stories Do More Than Weave Us Together.
12. Listen to “That’s What I Call Home” by Blake Shelton
13. “Family is not an important thing. It's everything.” —Michael J. Fox
14. Listen to Lake Wobegon Family Reunion: Selected Stories by Garrison Keillor.
15. Watch Look at Us Now, Mother.
Listen to our podcast with Gayle and Mildred Kirschenbaum of Look at Us Now, Mother, here.
16. Record a grandparent or parent telling a story about his or her youth.
17. Take a hike – together!
18. Listen to “There Goes My Life” by Kenny Chesney.
19. “A family is a risky venture, because the greater the love, the greater the loss....That's the trade-off. But I’ll take it all.” —Brad Pitt
20. Read Tomlinson Hill by Chris Tomlinson.
21. Watch Despicable Me.
22. Commit to having at least one meal a day together.
Read more: Family Strong
23. Listen to “100 Years” by Five for Fighting.
24. “I believe the world is one big family, and we need to help each other.” —Jet Li
25. Read The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
26. Watch Madea’s Family Reunion.
27. Learn or share a secret family recipe.
28. “I’ve always put my family first and that’s just the way it is.” —Jamie Lee Curtis
29. Learn a song or language of cultural significance to your roots.
30. Watch Father of the Bride.
31. Volunteer as a family.
32. Host a family game night.
33. Be sure to look for “33 Ideas on Play” in the next issue of Live Happy.
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When Gift Giving Goes Wrong
I once counseled a couple named Jill and John. For Jill’s birthday, John decided that it would be really special to surprise her with a fabulous dessert. Her birthday was close to the Fourth of July, and the local market was featuring a huge display of cherry pies. John thought, “I don’t want to be predictable. I’m not going to get her the standard birthday cake; I’m going to get her something special. I am going to buy her a cherry pie! Little did he know that not only did Jill not like pie, she hated cherries.
A gift as sweet as cherry pie
John was so excited because he thought outside of the box and was already envisioning this as the start of a tradition. He came home with the pie hidden inside a huge beautiful tissue-filled gift bag. Jill looked at the package with joy and excitedly reached inside the bag. When she saw the pie, her face fell.
“What is this?” she asked. “A cherry pie!” John said proudly. “I hate cherries, and I hate pie! Who would ever choose a pie for a birthday gift?” Without asking any questions or being open to his explanation, Jill ran into the next room and slammed the door.
Jill reacted based on her (high) expectations and lashed out. If she had heard the story, she would have realized how sweet and well-meaning John was. She found out two weeks later when they came to see me about this conflict.
It really is the thought that counts
With a little bit of patience and a strong desire to connect, Jill and John learned about one another’s gift-receiving style. The irony of it is that John still gets Jill a cherry pie every year (it’s a tradition). She still doesn’t eat the pie, but she shares it with family and enjoys her favorite vanilla ice cream with one cherry on top.
I share this story with you because even though gift giving and receiving can bring with it lots of pleasure, the challenges and expectations that come along with it can sink the experience—even when laden with the best of intentions.
Read more: Give Happy
Gifts come loaded with expectations
According to one survey by the National Retail Federation, about $60 billion in gifts are returned in the course of a single calendar year. (Obviously this dramatic statistic does not include the number of gifts that were politely kept in a back closet.)
Gift giving and receiving can come loaded with a great deal of psychological and emotional baggage. It often provides a window into how we feel about one another. It can send a nonverbal message that lets someone know his or her value; it can be used as a means of building a bond; it is a way of showing gratitude or appreciation; and it can even impact the quality and stability of a relationship. Both material and sentimental gifts can be mood-altering.
Despite the lofty notion that all gifts should be received graciously, and all gifts should be given with love and thoughtfulness, there are far too many circumstances in which the exchange falls short of our ideals. Part of what makes gift giving such dangerous territory is that it isn’t just about the gift, it’s about the perception of how much or how little you understand the person’s wants and needs.
ADVICE FOR THE GIVER
Put yourself in the receiver’s shoes. Ask yourself what type of gift is meaningful to the recipient and what he or she might think and feel upon receiving a certain gift. Always keep in mind that there may be an underlying meaning to a gift and ask yourself what message you might be sending.
Understand the social context of a gift exchange (a birthday, wedding shower, roast, holiday, etc.) and the acceptable price range based on previous exchanges with this person.
Know the recipient’s general likes and take into account age, gender and taste. I’ve found that women tend to prefer gifts that are sentimental and have extra thought and meaning put into them. Men tend to prefer gifts that are practical and functional. A man might be truly surprised when his wife reacts negatively to the new microwave oven he got her for Mother’s Day!
Keep your eye out for hints that the receiver may not even realize that he or she is giving, such as a subtle comment like, “I rarely spend the money to get myself a massage.”
If you know that a family member finds gift cards impersonal, pick out an item from a store that has a liberal return policy.
Read more: 9 Great Gifts That Are Experiences
ADVICE FOR THE RECEIVER
To help others find just the right gift for you, spend some time wandering through stores, looking at catalogues, or researching classes you might take with family or friends. Discuss your favorite things year-round, so that you can always have ideas when the subject of gift giving comes up.
Find subtle ways to steer the giver in the right direction so that both of you get the most happiness and best experience out of the exchange.
When receiving any gift, whether you like it or not, be outwardly gracious, express appreciation for the gesture and send a thank you card. It is one of those social skills that parents spend an enormous amount of time teaching their children, especially when they open up gifts in front of others!
Stacy Kaiseris a licensed psychotherapist, author, relationship expert and media personality. She is also the author of the best-selling book,How to Be a Grown Up: The Ten Secret Skills Everyone Needs to Know, and an editor-at-large for Live Happy. Stacy is a frequent guest on television programs such asTodayandGood Morning America.
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Giving From Heart and Hands
Two steps into the little yarn shop on Third Street, and I simply laughed in delight. To a woman with a passion for knitting, Knit Culture in Los Angeles is a whisper of heaven. From floor to ceiling, baskets, shelves and cubbies are stuffed with a thousand skeins of yarn from a thousand farms all over the world—neatly arranged by texture and color. Bamboo yarns from Sichuan Province in China. Silk yarns from a plantation in India. Plumped-up wooly rastas from sheep farms in Uruguay, cashmere from goat farms in Mongolia. Soft baby alpaca yarn from Vermont. And the colors! Passionate purples, demure beiges, moody sea greens, curried yellows, rich creams and wild oranges all reflect the warm California light from the store’s front window—judiciously aided by halogen spots that allow the colors to glow with energy.
Reverently, I reach out a hand to touch the delicate yarn of a baby alpaca, and I’m deftly caught in the eternal question of the passionate knitter: “What can I make with this?”
Cast on!
Somewhere around 28 million of us now regularly gather in yarn shops, knitting retreats and neighborhood knitting circles, so people are beginning to get used to us crazy knitters ooh-ing and ah-ing over a pile of yarn as though it were a baby. Today we knit everything from Christmas stockings to sweaters for family and friends. But according to the Craft Yarn Council of America, a whopping 49 percent of those who knit in the United States also spend time creating hats, socks, scarves, mittens and shawls for those who are ill, bereaved, abandoned, homeless and without hope.
The payback for our generosity is immediate. Knitters have found that soft yarn, rhythmic movements and yarn-besotted friends counter the hard stresses, isolation and frantic pace of daily life. And studies back us up. At Harvard Medical School, for example, one study suggests that knitting drops us into a relaxed, meditative state that reduces blood pressure, lowers heart rate and mobilizes the 40,000 genes in the body to induce changes that counteract the effects of stress. Another study, this one published in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy, found that 81 percent of study participants diagnosed with depression reported feeling happier after knitting—and half of them emphasized that they were “very” happy.
Knitting may cause the brain to release the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin, explains Dr. Carrie Barron, a psychiatrist at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York and a knitter herself. What’s more, there’s some suggestion that engaging in any activity that releases serotonin on a regular basis can, over time, “train” the brain to release more of it, thus suggesting that a simple hobby like knitting can have a long-term effect on our happiness.
“We need more research,” Carrie says. “But I think we have a real need to make things. And knitting for others takes the effects of knitting on our psyche to a whole other level. It connects us to others in a very deep way.”
Save the babies
Few understand the deep connections knitting makes better than former Washington state social worker Jackie Lambert. Jackie is the caring woman who spends 40 hours a week knitting hats and sweaters for children who need them—particularly the Syrian children who now live in refugee camps in Jordan and throughout the Middle East.
Of the 3 million men, women and children who fled the brutality rampant in Syria over the past two years, nearly 740,000 ended up in Jordan only to find that winter in the desert manifests its own kind of brutality. “Millions of people left Syria with just the clothes on their back,” Jackie says. “Now they’re living in tents in the snow. Every child needs a hat, a sweater and a blanket, and nobody has socks.”
The U.N.’s World Health Organization stresses the need for hats to prevent life-threatening heat loss in babies, which is one reason why knitters around the world have had their needles clicking since the first wave of refugees left Syria. Two women from Ireland and an artist working with Save the Children in Syria launched a group called Save the Babies: Hats for War-Torn Syria, then put out an online call to knitters. The response was amazing. One newspaper reported 4,000 hats have been sent to Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp alone.
“You hear horrific things on the news, but this is something you can do something about on a one-to-one basis,” Jackie says. “For every child who gets a hat and a sweater, that’s one kid who isn’t getting cold.”
Handmade Especially for You!
While some of us knit to keep people warm, others knit to bring them comfort. And that includes California transplant Leslye Borden. Leslye had always loved knitting, so when she retired from running her own photo-sourcing agency in New York, she figured she’d spend her time sitting in the sun with a pair of needles and a ball of yarn. “I made the most gorgeous things for my three granddaughters,” she chuckles.
“Beautiful sweaters, skirts, legwarmers, mittens, muffs—wherever they went people would stop them and ask, ‘Where did you get that?’ ” But as her daughter finally pointed out, how many sweaters, leg-warmers and mittens did the girls need? And where were they supposed to store them all? So Leslye looked around to find others who might need her gifts. She stumbled across an organization in Chicago that asked women to knit scarves for women who had been raped.
“I had no idea when I made them what the scarves could do,” Leslye says. “I thought they’d be like a security blanket—something to hold on to.” But abused women told Leslye that the scarves felt like a hug around the neck and gave them a lift. And that’s all it took to yank her out of retirement.
“I was amazed by the response,” Leslye says. She founded Handmade Especially for You, a nonprofit organization based near her home in Rancho Palos Verdes, and decided to make whimsical, wildly colorful scarves for women in California who had escaped abusive situations. In 2008, she approached yarn shop owner June Grossberg, who’d opened Concepts in Yarn in Torrance, California, and got enough donated yarn to knit a trunk-full of scarves—plus space to hold a scarf-knitting group every Wednesday night that continues today.
Other yarn shops began sending Leslye yarn, knitters all over the state volunteered to help, and the next thing Leslye knew she was bagging yarn to send to knitters and shipping or delivering 12,000 scarves a year to 60 shelters throughout the state—each scarf with an attached tag signed by the knitter that says, “Made especially for you!”
“My husband and I used to have a beautiful home,” Leslye says, chuckling. “Now everything is yarn or scarves—bags of yarn waiting to be wrapped, boxes of yarn waiting to be shipped, and boxes of scarves waiting to be opened.” She laughs. “I just love it!”
A mother bear on the loose
Leslye is not the only knitter to find herself launching an organization in response to someone’s need for nurturing. When Amy Berman, a Minnesota sales representative and mother of two young children, read a magazine story on virgin rape in sub-Saharan Africa some years ago, it made her sick. The story revealed a cultural myth that having sex with a virgin—including toddlers and infants—would protect or cure men from AIDS.
The result was a practice that had left shattered children across the region and an increase in HIV and AIDS. “It was the most horrible thing I could think of,” says Amy, a former volunteer rape counselor. “Something that hurt kids and spread AIDS as well?” She shudders. “I had to do something.” Researching her options online, Amy found that South African police were asking for small gifts that might bring a tiny moment of comfort to the children touched by sexual violence.
The image of her own kids cuddling the small, stuffed bears her mother had knitted for them flashed into her mind. The bears had comforted her kids when they were little. Could a group of knitters make them for children in Africa? Amy spoke to her mother, Gerre Hoffman, who was on board in an instant.
The two worked out four bear patterns, and gave them to anyone who could knit. Amy went to a yarn trade show to spread the word, her mother started giving knitting lessons, a newspaper did a story and, within weeks, 3,000 requests for patterns came pouring in—followed in short order by package after package of colorful hand-knit bears, each with personal touches added by its knitter.
Amy chuckles. “The bears took over my house!” Friends, family and knitters flocked to help. Big red hearts were sewn onto each bear because Amy wanted kids who received the bears to feel that there was someone, somewhere, who loved them. Knitters also added a tag hand-signed by the “mother bear” who made the bear.
Amy made contacts in Africa, set up a distribution network, rented some storage space, and—borrowing the “mother bear” nickname with which her son had tagged her when he was a toddler—she named her emerging organization the Mother Bear Project. She also expanded the project to include those who had been orphaned by AIDS.
Today more than 110,000 bears made by more than a thousand knitters from all across the globe are carrying a mother bear’s love to children touched by HIV/AIDS.
Ripples of love
While small bears bring comfort to children in Africa, prayer shawls—made as the knitter prays for the recipient and weaves her blessings into the gift—bring comfort to adults who are hurting around the world. Few of the knitters realize that the idea to knit prayer shawls was hatched by two women who were attending Hartford Seminary in Connecticut nearly 20 years ago. Janet Severi Bristow and Victoria Cole-Galo saw the comfort a shawl touched by prayer brought to a grieving classmate whose husband had died. They launched “The Prayer Shawl Ministry” as both a spiritual practice for knitters and a source of comfort for those who received the gift of their work.
Today, 3,000 prayer shawl groups around the world have made an uncountable number of shawls, and Janet and Vicky feel humbled by the work they were led to do. “It’s all been a surprise,” Janet says. “The emails, the [four] books we’ve written, the gatherings.…” She shakes her head in amazement. “It was truly out of our hands. It was nothing about us. It was what we were meant to do.”
Thinking about the 200 or so knitters who gather each November at a Hartford church to celebrate their work, she adds, “It touches me deeply that the love exhibited in that [church] ripples out to the world through the work of their hands and the prayers of their hearts.”
Listening to Janet, I look over at the tumble of colorful yarns tucked in a basket near my chair, and I realize that with a half-dozen balls of that yarn and a pair of bamboo needles, I can make my own ripples and give someone who is half a world away the sense of being wrapped in love. Slowly, I get up from my chair and move toward the basket—feeling my heart lift with joy.
Ellen Michaud is a Live Happy editor at large based in Vermont.
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Say Thank You [Video]
[video:https://vimeo.com/125450519 width:525 height:394 align:center autoplay:0]Originally posted on Happier.TV
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