Reading   (anon.)

Michael is the kind of guy you love to hate. He is always in a good mood and always has something positive to say.

When someone would ask him how he was doing, would say, "If I were any better, I would be twins!"

He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Michael was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Michael and asked him, "I don't get it! You can't be a positive person all of the time.  How do you do it?"

Michael replied, "Each morning I wake up and say to myself, you have two choices today.
You can choose to be in a good mood or ....you can choose to be in a bad mood. I choose to be in a good mood.

Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or...I can choose to learn from it.

I choose to learn...

"Life isn't that easy," I protested. "Yes, it is," Michael said. "Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice.

You can choose how you react to situations. You can choose how people affect your mood.
You can choose to be in a good mood or bad mood.

 Several years later, I heard that Michael was involved in a serious accident, falling some 60 feet from a communications tower.

After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Michael was released from the hospital with rods placed in his back.

I saw him about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied. "If I were any better, I'd be twins. Wanna see my scars?" I declined to see his wounds, but I did ask him what had gone through his mind as the accident took place. "As I lay on the ground, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or... I could choose to die.  I chose to live."

"You must have been so scared," I said.

Michael continued, "...the paramedics were great - they kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when I saw the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read "he's a dead man. I knew I needed to take action."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Well, there was a big nurse shouting questions at me. "She asked if I was allergic to anything.
I took a deep breath and yelled, "Gravity." Over their laughter, I told them, "I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead."

Michael lived, thanks to the skill of his doctors, and because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.

"It's Hard If You Think It Is"

My husband recently bought a Chevy tracker. The promo material called it "a Vehicle With Attitude!" as if there were only one attitude possible.  The advertisers probably want buyers to think the tracker has a "tough" attitude, that this is a vehicle that can get the job done!  But a Chevy tracker is a little teeny SUV.  If it does have a winning attitude it's probably more like the little engine that could, When it confronts a big hill with its 4-wheel drive the little car begins its mantra, "I think I can, I think I can" - and up the hill it goes… Larry and all!

Attitude may not be everything, but it is important and it colors our lives in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. There is more than one attitude - (you know this)  Attitudes are stances that we take towards various things, events, people or our work that reflect our emotions and our values. Most of us don't choose a specific attitude, like Michael did in the reading, we simply have attitudes in a pretty unexamined state. Most of us are actually very undisciplined about our attitudes and they are very changeable - that's why advertisements can be so effective.  Sometimes our attitude towards the world in a given moment is based on little more than what side of the bed we get out of in the morning.

A wonderful story about a grouchy morning person comes from the concierge of one of the finest New York hotels.  The renown pianist Vladmir Horowitz was staying in a suite there during one of his seasons at Carnegie Hall several years ago.

It was the Horowitz's custom to practice for a couple of hours every morning on a magnificent piano which he had had especially brought in.

On the third morning of his stay an angry lady stormed down to the front desk and said, "Someone is hammering on a two bit piano every morning across the hall from me. This is the third day.  It is driving me mad, and unless you stop it I shall leave immediately."

The concierge, in amazement, could only think to reply with the truth. "But madam, that is Vladmir Horowitz!"

The lady was only momentarily speechless with surprise and then said, "Vladmir Howowitz! Well, that's different.  Of course I hadn't the slightest idea.  I adore good music. I am an excellent musician myself. Please say nothing at all about it." The hotel man was much amused to note that thereafter, for the remainder of Horowitz's stay, the woman kept the door of her suite wide open and entertained friends for breakfast while he practiced.

The story reminds me of a quip:  Sometimes I wake up grouchy in the morning - sometimes I let her sleep!

We are all vulnerable to reacting to the world around us like this woman did, based, not on what is really happening so much as on a mood or attitude we have brought to it. Reacting this way could be called the limburger syndrome due to the following story:  A man was taking a nap one Sunday afternoon when his son decided to play a trick on him. He put limburger cheese on his father's moustache while he was sleeping. Later, when the dad woke up, he smelled the cheese and thought to himself, "This room stinks." He proceeded to the kitchen and said, "This kitchen stinks." Then, in the living room he thought, "The living room stinks too."  So he went outside, and when he still smelled the bad cheese and said, "The whole world stinks."  I think it is possible to walk around tainted by the limburger syndrome for days and even months at a time.

Now, think about Michael, the fellow in our reading. We have a choice. And what we are learning now is that the choice we make effects much more than the mood we happen to be in on a given day.

In the moments following Michael's grievous injury, he made a conscious decision to have a positive attitude and to make sure others knew his desire to live.  Twenty years ago most medical doctors would have shrugged off his desire to live, under these circumstances as warm and fuzzy and irrelevant, no more helpful than making a wish on a shooting star or believing that if you blow out all your birthday candles in one breath that wish will come true.  But now doctors are saying that ain't necessarily so. A couple of weeks ago Time Magazine devoted an entire special issue to the Mind/Body connection.  The first piece of news in the story was the fact that there apparently is a mind/body connection - western medicine is coming to understand something that the east has known for a long time - the mind and body, are part of a single system, and each can and does affect the other.  

Time spent quite a lot of space documenting the negative aspect of this connection: how stress, which starts in the brain, can unleash a flood of hormones which can tense muscles and shut down digestion. Chronic stress can lead to a weakened immune system, loss of bone mass and suppression of the reproductive system. Depression is known to be linked to coronary artery disease and cardiovascular disease.  People with such afflictions as cancer, diabetes epilepsy and osteoporosis appear to run a higher risk of disability or premature death when they are clinically depressed. If those psychological states can effect us physically, doesn't it follow that people who are simply pessimistic, critical, downbeat or negative pay a price for those attitudes emotional states too?  If we let our dark attitudes fester, we can be affected spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically.

The mind/body connection also has positive ramifications. Here's a dazzling illustration. A British psychiatrist, by the name of J.A. Hadfield asked three people to submit themselves to a test  of  the mind's effect on strength which consisted of having them grip something called a dynamometer as hard as they could. Under normal conditions the average grip was 101 pounds. Then, using hypnosis, he planted the idea that they were very weak. This time their average grip was only 29 pounds! In the third test when he told them under hypnosis that they were very strong, the average grip jumped to 142 pounds.[1] That's a 113 pound spread.  We've all heard occasional stories over the years of someone miraculously picking up a car when someone was trapped underneath and wondered how that could possibly be. Studies like this tell us that we are not tapping our full psychological or spiritual potential.

In the east awareness of the mind/body connection is called mindfulness. The great spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh describes meditation as a tool for attitude awareness adjustment. These are his words: "Consciousness exists on two levels: as seeds and as manifestations of these seeds…. There are many kinds of seeds in us, both good and bad. Some were planted during our lifetime, and some were transmitted by our parents, our ancestors and our society….Our ancestors and our parents have given us seeds of joy, peace and happiness, as well as seeds of sorrow, anger, and so on. Every time we practice mindful living, we plant healthy seeds and strengthen the healthy seeds already in us. Healthy seeds function similarly to antibodies.  When a virus enters our bloodstream, our body reacts and surround it, take care and transform it.  This is true with our psychological seeds as well.  If we plant wholesome, healing, refreshing seeds, they will take care of the negative seeds, without our asking them. To succeed, we need to cultivate a good reserve of refreshing seeds."[2]

Because western medical studies indicate that this is true, some heart patients are now tentatively being offered optional programs of massage, yoga or meditation. Some health plans are covering classes in their benefit packages. Follow-up studies on such patients are showing that those who meditate do better in terms of managing pain and reducing anxiety. Meditation has also proved valuable in reducing blood pressure, slowing heart rates, improving mood and it even may slow tumor progression in prostate-cancer patients.

One of the first western doctors to teach a mind/body connection and the importance of attitude was Dr. Bernie Siegal. He tells about a time that he and his wife were staying in a hotel, and their room was broken into and some of their precious possessions, were taken— irreplaceable, family things. They were sure who had done it because on their way out to dinner, they saw a suspicious-looking man loitering the hallway near their room. His was the face that popped into their minds when they returned to the room and discovered the theft.

They reported the loss to the police, and spent some time talking about the experience before they went to bed that night. The next morning, when Siegel tried to do his meditation, he was interrupted by the picture of the man in the hallway and by the thoughts of what he would like to do to him. The same thing happened the next morning, and the next.

Even after they returned home, the man’s face followed him, and he was filled with angry thoughts that disrupted not only his meditation time, but almost every other waking moment. It was several weeks later that Bernie realized that the burglar had taken over his thoughts and his life, and that was the point at which he made a conscious decision to reclaim his life and his thoughts by changing his attitude about this whole experience. And he did. As a result of this event, Bernie Siegel said, "The burglar taught me that events are not my problem. My thoughts about the events are the problem. This is fortunate, because I can’t change the things that have happened but I can change my thoughts about them"

Siegal's story brought to mind a turning point in my life. During my childhood after the death of my father, my mother drank to get through her lonely days. A new friend became her drinking companion. Through my young eyes it looked like this woman was responsible for my mother's drunkenness. I hated her with a vengeance for it. Walking home from school each day if I saw my mother's car at her house or her car at ours, I immediately became preoccupied by my hatred. It was like flipping on a switch.

This went on month after month. There seemed to be no end to the pattern we were locked in together. I felt this woman was ruining my life as well as my mother's. Then one day it occurred to me that this woman was doing nothing to me but I was being harmed nonetheless. Like Bernie Siegal I realized my thoughts were my problem, my responsibility. Once I came to accept responsibility for my feelings, over time they began to shift. It dawned on me that I knew the sadness that made my mother drink.  I didn't know why this other woman drank, but there was probably a reason, she was probably as much a victim of life as my mother. This awareness allowed me to move on.

Later in life I found a quote - one sentence -  from the poet William Butler Yeats which summarized the realizion that I had come to in those earlier days, that has became central to my understanding of the world.  Yeats said:

"He who has contempt for any man has faculties which he has never used." Let me repeat that.  "He who has contempt for any man has faculties which he as never used." 

There are two very important ideas in that one brief line

1)    your harmful attitude is your responsibility 2) you have the faculties, the capacity, to change. 

This same sentiment was expressed beautifully by Paul in the book of Romans, chapter 12, verse 2 - when he says, "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind."

We cannot always control life's circumstances. People die, the bird sings outside our window, we stub our toe, and the Celtics win. The world brings a surging, shifting collage of events to us every day.  We can't control most of them.  But we do have the power to control the attitude we bring to the day.

I will end with this thought:

Both the hummingbird and the vulture fly over our nation's deserts. Vultures look for the flesh of dead animals. They thrive on what is dead and gone. Hummingbirds, on the other hand, look for the colorful blossoms of desert plants. They fill themselves with freshness and life. As you make your way through life, which one will you be? You choose. Each bird finds what it is looking for. We all do.