Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Black, heeled platforms. The front pedestal raised the ball of my foot off the ground two and half inches, and the heel, that gloriously slim yet strong heel, raised me up a solid seven inches. Finally, for the first time since being on pointe, I felt myself to be taller than the truth. But most important, my feet were far above the ground: it is the place where I am at my best in both mind and body. And, if necessary, these shoes could deliver a very healthy kick. My new shoes became both shield and armor in the battle for a new way to live. I ended up buying pairs in all the other colors: silver, sky blue, and serious pink. Once strapped on, these shoes changed my entire demeanor. I became my own Amazon—Aphrodite, Artemis, and Athena rolled into one. A-Woman was born. Equal in height to most men, I was now taller than many. I walked slowly, deliberately, proudly, stupendously on my shimmering, high-heeled weapons. Hope sprang alive as I peered about from my new perch. No longer looking up, I was looking down. No longer Slave, I was Mistress: the only refuge for a submissive with no Master. I started wearing my shoes around the house. With sweatpants, with underwear, without underwear, dusting a shelf, doing the dishes. One time I even shaved my pussy in the heels in order to do the dishes. Therapy. And I continued to rinse out my ass every time I bathed—a gesture of hope in a vacant lot. Then, one day, as Leonard Cohen was singing “Dance Me to the End of Love” through the speakers, I started swaying to the music—“moving like they do in Babylon”—and I knew that I would be dancing again before too long in my “Don’t-Fuck-With-Me” shoes. I was healed. I had made the leap across the open chasm. It wasn’t as wide as I’d thought. All those abbreviated M-words were never bridge enough to the other side. I never really liked being a “Miss.” Too prissy. It was slightly better in French—“Mlle.”—but still felt wanting—too petite for my budding enormity. Then came the opportunity for “Mrs.” which felt horrendous, like my mother, and its dry, neutered alternative, “Ms.” The problem with them all is that what followed was always a man’s name—a father’s or a husband’s. Now I only recognize titles befitting a woman who belongs to herself. Having traveled the long and twisted road from Masochist to Mistress . . . What next? Madam? Muse? And with whom? Perhaps with a man who is difficult to love. A-Man provided no challenge in this regard. Loving him was so easy, too easy; not loving him was hell. So perhaps the opposite: loving that is difficult, leaving that is easy. Would I not then learn some tolerance?

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Quiero sonreír, porque mi corazón está henchido y se siente bien, pero también estoy llena de algo que no puedo identificar. Es como una docena de emociones diferentes inundándome a la vez, y lo único que puedo hacer es tomar pequeñas y superficiales bocanadas de aire. —Bien —le susurro. No estoy segura si lo que dijo fue lo que quería escuchar o lo que necesitaba escuchar, pero siento que mis hombros se cuadran un poco más y mi barbilla se levanta con buena disposición. Por el tiempo que dure, soy un poco más valiente, y él es mi nuevo héroe. Observo mientras saca una pequeña caja y procede a encender un fósforo, la pequeña llama brilla intensamente. Lo pone en una de las donas, todo el glaseado rosa que Shel pidió, porque sabe que es mi color favorito, brilla en la luz. Siento mi corazón calentarse por el gesto. Bajando los pies, me inclino hacia adelante, cierro los ojos y pido lo que quiero en mi cabeza, luego apago la llama. Sin embargo, no deseé lo que siempre deseo. Mi mente de repente queda en blanco, y no estoy recordando todas las cosas que necesito y quiero ahora mismo fuera de este teatro. Solo lo único en lo que puedo pensar. Ambos nos sentamos y nos acomodamos, cada uno con otra dona cuando las luces finalmente se atenúan, y el sonido envolvente nos golpea desde ambos lados del teatro. Durante los próximos noventa minutos, comemos y reímos, y escondo mi rostro un par de veces cuando sé que algo está por venir. Salto aquí y allá, y me río de él cuando lo hace, porque parece avergonzado. Después de un rato, noto que mi cabeza se inclina hacia él, y él tiene su pie sobre la silla vacía delante de nosotros con su cabeza inclinada, también, y estamos completamente cómodos. Ni siquiera se me ha ocurrido mantener una cierta distancia. No veo muchas películas con otras personas. No estoy acostumbrada a simplemente sentarme en silencio con alguien más. Los horarios de Cole y los míos no siempre se combinan, mi hermana Cam ya no tiene tiempo libre, y la mayoría de mis amistades de la escuela secundaria no duraron más allá de la graduación hace un año. Es agradable pasar el rato. En el momento en que se publican los créditos, no estoy segura de recordar gran parte de la película. Pero no he estado tan relajada en mucho tiempo. Me reí, sonreí, bromeé y olvidé todo lo que estaba sucediendo allí afuera, y lo necesitaba. Realmente no quiero volver a casa todavía. Las luces comienzan a encenderse y lentamente me siento, llevando mis pies al suelo mientras trago el nudo en mi garganta y lo miro. Él también se sienta, pero apenas se encuentra con mis ojos. De pie, paso la correa del bolso sobre mi cabeza y recojo mi basura.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  It characterizes the nimbleness with which your primitive, nonconscious brain holds the reins on your galloping heart. I give you this quick tour of vagus because this conduit within you, between your brain and your heart, has a story to tell about how attuned you are to sources of love in your midst. It even makes a quiet prediction about what illnesses may beset you and how long you’re likely to live. Your biological propensities for love and health, as we shall see, are intimately intertwined. Measured at rest, vagal tone also tends to be extraordinarily stable over time. For most people, it remains roughly the same year after year, rhythmically channeling them toward loneliness or social prosperity, sickness or health. That’s because people with higher vagal tone, science has shown, are more flexible across a whole host of domains—physical, mental, and social. They simply adapt better to their ever-shifting circumstances, albeit completely at nonconscious levels. Physically, they regulate their internal bodily processes more efficiently, like their glucose levels and inflammation. Mentally, they’re better able to regulate their attention and emotions, even their behavior. Socially, they’re especially skillful in navigating interpersonal interactions and in forging positive connections with others. By definition, then, they experience more micro-moments of love. It’s as though the agility of the conduit between their brains and hearts—as reflected in their high vagal tone— allows them to be exquisitely agile, attuned, and flexible as they navigate the ups and downs of day-to-day life and social exchanges. High vagal tone, then, can be taken as high loving potential. Indeed, this is what doctoral student Bethany Kok and I have found: Compared to people with lower vagal tone, those with higher vagal tone experience more love in their daily lives, more moments of positivity resonance. You might now be wondering whether you’re one of the lucky ones blessed with high vagal tone. If you are, that’s great. Yet even if you’re not advantaged with high vagal tone today, the latest science gives plenty of reason for hope. Just as you can build muscle tone through regular physical exercises, you can build vagal tone through regular emotional exercises of the kind I share in part II of this book. The key, once again, is the power of love. My students and I work together in what I call the PEP Lab, or the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory. Not long ago, we conducted an experiment on the effects of learning the ancient mind-training practice of loving-kindness meditation. Our study participants visited the PEP Lab at the University of North Carolina one by one, and we measured their vagal tone while they sat and relaxed for a few minutes. At the end of this initial laboratory testing session, we instructed participants how to log on to the study website each evening to record their emotions and social connections of the day.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  By and large, your protective armor works well. It shields you from routine emotional blows and keeps you from crumbling into self-pity or otherwise becoming devastated by negativity. Yet this sort of self-protection comes at a price. It can shield you from the especially good stuff as well. Sure enough, within your own walled-off cavern, you can and do readily experience genuine positive emotions, say, of interest, pride, inspiration, or peace. Yet your ability to share these good feelings with others is compromised. Put differently, in making yourself bulletproof you may also numb yourself to possibilities for true connection. Being less able to connect, in turn, shuts you and your body out from registering and creating opportunities for positivity resonance, which are both life-giving and health-conferring. To be sure, there are more ways to face emotional storms than to be flattened by or impervious to them. For more than a decade, my students and I have studied the psychological habits of resilient people. These are the ones who, when faced with emotional storms, bend without breaking and bounce back to weather the next storm even better equipped than they were for the last. Resilient people, our studies have shown, are emotionally agile. They neither steel themselves against negativity, nor wallow in it. Instead, they meet adversity with clear eyes, superbly attuned to the nuances of their ever-changing circumstances. This allows them to effortlessly calibrate their reactions to their circumstances, meeting them with a fitting emotional response, neither overblown nor insensitive. When the circumstances warrant, they can be moved to tears or shaken. They don’t defend themselves against bad feelings like these. Yet neither do they overly identify with them. Rather, their negative emotions rise up, like an ocean wave, and then dissolve. Strong emotions move through them, which allows them to move on in their wake. What allows resilient people to be so agile? As I detailed in Positivity, their agility stems from their steady diet of positive emotion. Each successive experience of positive emotion, after all, gives them a fresh experience of openness. Resilient people come to better register and appreciate the larger contexts of life, which allows them to respond to emotional upsets with more perspective, flexibility, and grace. Our data indeed show that life gets better and better for people who experience more positive emotions than others, not simply because positive emotions feel good, but because good feelings nourish resilience. Being better equipped to manage inevitable ups and downs is what makes life itself more satisfying. Resilient people are more hopeful, more excited to rise up to challenges, more appreciative of their many blessings. These positive emotions, our lab experiments show, help flush out any lingering aftereffects of negativity within you. They dismantle or undo the grip that negative emotions can gain on your mind and body alike, the grip that—when too long-lasting—can make you vulnerable to illness and even early death.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Nosotros, aferrándonos a Nick al aferrarnos el uno al otro. Ambos estábamos desesperados por un amigo verdadero. Él y yo lamentándonos por Nick, pero también yo alejándome de mi ex novio. Fue tan fácil sumergirse el uno en el otro y escapar. Tan fácil. ―Lo siento mucho, Jordan ―dice Pike―. ¿Estás bien? Lo miro fijamente. —Lo siento ―vacila, apartando la mirada―. Es estúpido preguntar esto ahora, supongo. No, no es estúpido en absoluto. Es agradable tener a alguien con quien hablar. ―Todo está bien. O lo estará ―digo―. Tiene que estarlo. Lanza su mirada hacia mí otra vez, y señalo hacia la piscina. ―Me senté en el fondo de una piscina oscura con los ojos cerrados hasta que no pude contener más mi respiración. Tiene que estar bien ahora, ¿cierto? ―pregunto. Resopla, curvando su boca en una sonrisa. Se levanta y estira su mano de nuevo, y esta vez la tomo. Me levanta, y nos dirigimos a la casa, pero noto que la vela todavía está encendida sobre la mesa de madera. Dirigiéndome ahí, me inclino sobre la mesa, cierro los ojos, y soplo, la vela se apaga. Retrocediendo, lo sigo por las escaleras. ―¿Puedo hacerte otra pregunta? ―dice. ―Claro. ―¿Por qué haces eso? ―Me mira. ―¿Qué? ―Lo de cerrar los ojos para soplar una vela ―explica―. Te he visto hacerlo unas cuantas veces. Me encojo de hombros, sin darme cuenta que lo había notado. Pensé que me había vuelto bastante buena haciéndolo rápidamente y sin que nadie me viera. ―Solo una peculiaridad. ―Lo sigo por la puerta mosquitera―. Los deseos de cumpleaños no siempre se hacen realidad, así que no pierdo la oportunidad cuando soplo una vela. —Hola, ¿puedes recogerme a las dos? —Coloco el teléfono entre mi oreja y mi hombro mientras cuento el efectivo y lo pongo en la caja—. Ash no vino. Su bebé está enfermo, y no tengo quien me lleve. —Sí, sí —dice Cole—. Por supuesto. Estaré allí. Después de nuestra última pelea, las cosas progresaron exactamente como lo predije. Llegó borracho y relajado a casa, se metió en la cama, y nos acurrucamos. Las cosas casi han vuelto a la normalidad, o lo que es nuestra normalidad, en cualquiera caso, lo suficiente como para que no me importara cuando trató de llevarme a la ducha esta mañana. Sin embargo, cuando entramos a nuestro baño, descubrimos que su padre había arrancado el lavamanos y había comenzado a arrancar las baldosas de la ducha, nuestro baño era lo siguiente en su lista de renovación. ¿Cómo habíamos dormido con todo eso? ¿Y a qué hora se levantó esta mañana? —Terminaré a las dos —repito, cerrando la caja registradora. —Sí, lo tengo. Te amo. —También te amo —respondo y cuelgo.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Resilient people are more hopeful, more excited to rise up to challenges, more appreciative of their many blessings. These positive emotions, our lab experiments show, help flush out any lingering aftereffects of negativity within you. They dismantle or undo the grip that negative emotions can gain on your mind and body alike, the grip that —when too long-lasting—can make you vulnerable to illness and even early death. The science of resilience has deepened considerably within the last decade. We’ve seen not only a groundswell of scientific interest in the topic but also a fundamental shift in how resilience is viewed. Before, experts saw resilience in the face of adversity as a rare human feat; we now know that, in the context of a well-functioning emotion system, resilience can be normative, or standard. We also now know that people’s levels of resilience are not set in stone, or DNA. They can be improved through experience and training. So as you practice the skills, detailed in part II of this book, to increase your daily diet of positivity resonance, you’ll become more resilient, too, better able to adapt to life’s inevitable upsets and adversity. Resilient people don’t go it alone. Even as kids, they were especially adept at using humor to get others to smile or laugh along with them. In these and other ways, resilient kids are adept at stoking positivity resonance with their friends and caretakers. Developmental psychologists contend that resilient kids cultivated this capacity through their experiences of sensitive parenting as infants. Some parents, more than others, are adept at interpreting and matching their infant’s ever-changing emotional states. They can smoothly repair their infant’s distress to create micro-moments of positivity resonance. These more sensitive and attuned parents help their children to develop their own store of self-soothing techniques, coping mechanisms that ultimately allow the children to become ever more self-sufficient as they grow older. Resilience, then, doesn’t just originate from positive emotions; it originates from positivity resonance. More often than not, you don’t face stress and adversity by yourself, alone. You face it together with others. Divorce strains entire families after all; earthquakes rock whole communities; wars upend entire nations; and increasingly, an economic collapse can strain an entire planet. When resilient, you know just when to lend a hand, an ear, or a shoulder, and just when to seek out these and other sources of comfort and steadiness from others. Resilience, then, is not simply a property of individuals. It’s equally a property of social groups—of families, communities, nations, even the entire global community. Facing tough times together and well, researchers suggest, requires precisely that suite of personal and collective resources that micro-moments of positivity resonance serve to build.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  But right now—within this very moment that you are reading this sentence—your body is loveless. Moreover, love, as you’ve seen, obeys conditions. If you feel unsafe, or fail to find the time or contexts to truly connect with others, the delicate pas de deux of positivity resonance won’t commence. Beyond these obstacles, something more insidious may also be barring you from love. It’s your reaction to the L-word itself. Although you may be intrigued by the concept of positivity resonance, when it really comes down to it, you might hesitate to call that feeling love. You’d rather reserve this powerful word for your exclusive relationships—to describe your relationship to your spouse, your mother, or your kids—or at most for the micro-moments of positivity resonance you experience within those exclusive relationships. Some of my descriptions of love may have even drawn you to balk: Do I really need to call that moment of positive connection I just had with my coworker love? Was that love I just felt when I shared a smile with a complete stranger? Using the L-word to describe these sorts of connections makes you uneasy, uncomfortable. You’d prefer not to see them that way. Why not just say that you “got along” or “enjoyed each other’s company”? Does it really do any good to call this nonexclusive stuff love ? Obviously, I think it does. The scientific understanding of love and its benefits offers you a completely fresh set of lenses through which to see your world and your prospects for health, happiness, and spiritual wisdom. Through these new lenses you see things that you were literally blind to before. Ordinary, everyday exchanges with colleagues and strangers now light up and call out to you as opportunities—life-giving opportunities for connection, growth, and health, your own and theirs. You can also see for the first time how micro-moments of love carry irrepressible ripple effects across whole social networks, helping each person who experiences positivity resonance to grow and in turn touch and uplift the lives of countless others. These new lenses even change the way you see your more intimate relationships with family and friends. You now also see the rivers of missed opportunities for the true love of positivity resonance. You now know how to connect to and love these cherished people in your life more and better. Viewing love as distinct from long-standing relationships is especially vital as people increasingly face repeated geographical relocations that distance families and friends. Falling in love within smaller moments and with a greater variety of people gives new hope to the lonely and isolated among us. Love, I hope you see, bears upgrading.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Sharing more moments of positivity resonance in schools and neighborhoods, for instance, may help whole nations be more resilient during tough times. Resilience matters now more than ever, both your personal resilience, as well as the collective resilience that you cultivate within your family, your community, your nation, and our world. No matter how resilient you are today, higher levels of resilience are readily within your grasp. That’s because genuine positive emotions are available to you at any time. And when you connect with others over these good feelings, you create a positivity resonance that energizes and strengthens the metaphorical connective tissue that binds you. Love and resilience are renewable resources. Becoming Wise. Imagine having at your fingertips all the knowledge and experience to allow you to properly discern which of the many paths ahead of you to take. Imagine how it would feel to so readily grasp just the right thing to do and the right way to do it. You can accept yourself fully, even in light of your shortcomings and missteps. You’re able to shake free of your nagging self-criticism, worry, and rumination and enjoy the added mental capacity that this escape frees up. And you can now fully take in the whole of your surroundings. You effortlessly assess the core meanings of your current circumstances, as well as its more subtle, seemingly insignificant, details. Imagine not having to puzzle through how to make a good first impression, or how to add value to a group process. You can now understand the wide variety of people in your midst—and truly accept them. You intuitively understand their unique perspectives, know just what they want and need, and how best to connect with them. Imagine being able to glide through rough terrain—even complicated entanglements marked by suffering, uncertainty, or both—instinctively knowing how to move forward, while calming hearts and allaying fears, your own and those of others present. We call people who meet these ideals wise. They have what scientists call “expertise in the fundamental pragmatics of life.” They judiciously draw on their past experiences and values to arrive at practical and fitting courses of action for themselves and others in nearly any situation. They not only grasp the human condition and the meaning of life but are also able to translate these lofty philosophical insights into down-to-earth plans and advice. Wise people, studies show, are especially discerning because they are able to see holistically and integrate seemingly contradictory perspectives to achieve balance and well-being in everyday life. Broadened awareness, or being able to “see the big picture” and “connect the dots,” can thus be viewed as a core facet of wisdom. The tightly controlled laboratory experiments (described earlier in this chapter) convincingly reveal that the scope of your awareness changes dynamically over time, depending on your current emotional state.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Thankfully, you don’t need to be as thorough as Brandon or Albert. You don’t need to approach 130 attractive women, much less ten thousand strangers. The first approaches are the hardest: the first conversation, the first book club, the first softball practice. But don’t stop at one. At your next opportunity, do it again. And again. Each time, both the intensity and duration of your anxiety will lessen. Your mountain of anxiety will erode into a molehill. And your confidence will grow into a mountain. 10 Putting It All Together: Your Challenge List My life has been filled with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened. —MONTAIGNE Look in the dictionary for the “American Dream” and you might find a smiling picture of Jia Jiang. At the age of sixteen, Jia came to the United States from China with big ambitions: he wanted no less than to be the next Bill Gates. But as often happens, time passed quickly. High school, college, a first job, business school, marriage. Before he knew it, Jia was thirty, with a mortgage, a wife, and a baby on the way. Jia knew if he didn’t take the leap soon middle age and middle management would calcify around him. So with his wife’s blessing, he took a chance, quit his six-figure corporate job, and chased his lifelong dream: he founded a startup. Jia was in heaven. It was exactly as he had hoped: creative, social, fast-paced. He was brimming with energy and hope. But four months in, just as major funding was about to make Jia’s dream a reality, the funder bailed, leaving Jia with four employees, a family to support, and exactly zero income. Jia was crushed. He knew he had to find a new backer fast but was flooded by doubt. The investor is an entrepreneurial veteran, he thought. If he thinks my company is not worth investing in, there must be some truth to it. Jia’s doubts snowballed. You’re a wannabe, his Inner Critic sneered. He was paralyzed by the idea of casting around for more funding—the prospect of rejection was too frightening. Jia realized his anxiety was getting in the way of fulfilling his startup dream, so he decided to crush it with a boot camp–style project he called 100 Days of Rejection that, to his great surprise, resulted in a book, Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection. Each day, he tried his hardest to get rejected. He made ridiculous requests to complete strangers: “Wanna have a staring contest?” “Can I take a nap in this mattress store?” “Can you ship this package to Santa Claus?” “Can I slide down the fire station’s pole?” “Can I be a live mannequin at this Abercrombie store?” A lot of people said no, but given that he was trying to get rejected, getting a no made Jia’s project a success.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  You become better able to forge the interpersonal connections that give rise to positivity resonance. Through vagal tone, then, love begets love. Likewise, evidence suggests that positivity resonance raises your oxytocin levels. And under the influence of oxytocin, you grow calmer, more attuned to others, friendlier, and more open. Here, too, your skills for forging connections sharpen, which increases your ability to cultivate positivity resonance. Through oxytocin as well then, love begets love. Recall, too, that positive connections with others create neural coupling, or synchronous brain activity between people. With repetition, positivity resonance also produces structural changes in the brain, for instance, rendering the threat-detecting amygdala more sensitive to the calming influence of oxytocin. While much of the work on neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to change with experience—comes from research on nonhuman animals, tantalizing evidence has also recently emerged from studies of humans. Becoming a parent, for instance, not only opens the door for parent-infant positivity resonance but also appears to usher in structural changes in brain regions that facilitate positivity resonance. This research shows how love reroutes the neural wiring of your brain, making it more likely that you’ll have healthy habits and healthy social bonds in the future. Through brain plasticity, too, then, love begets love. Plasticity, or openness to change, characterizes your body’s cells as well. New cells are born within you all the time. Even now, as you take time to read this book, new cells are coming online within you, taking their predetermined place within the massive orchestra of communication and mutual influence that you call your body. Yet not everything about the birth of your new cells is scripted in advance by your DNA. Some aspects are open to contextual influences signaled by the changing biochemicals that course through you. If you feel lonely and disconnected from others, for instance, your circulating levels of the stress hormone cortisol will rise. Your cortisol levels, in turn, signal your immune system to alter the way your genes are expressed in your next-generation white blood cells, specifically making them less sensitive to cortisol. When this happens, studies show, your inflammatory response becomes more chronic, less responsive to cues that a crises situation has subsided. This is how, over time, chronic feelings of loneliness can weaken people’s immune systems and open the door to inflammation-based chronic illnesses, like cardiovascular disease and arthritis. The data go further to suggest that feeling isolated or unconnected to others does more bodily damage than actual isolation, suggesting that painful emotions drive the bodily systems that in turn steer you toward dire health outcomes. By tracking how your emotions—and the biochemical changes they trigger—alter gene expression within your immune system, the tools of molecular biology now show how a lack of love compromises your immunity and your health. Even so, there is ample reason for hope.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Likewise, nearly half of all single people say they yearn to find their own happiness by finding their own special person to love. While these numbers certainly varied culture by culture, they strike me as a worldwide collapse of imagination. Thinking of love purely as the romance or commitment that you share with one special person—as it appears most on earth do—surely limits the health and happiness you derive from micro-moments of positivity resonance. Put differently, your beliefs about what love is become self-fulfilling prophecies. If, for instance, you think love can in fact also bloom between you and the utter stranger with whom you connect for only a few minutes at the airport, then it more readily can. If, by contrast, you think love can bloom only between you and a special, predesignated one, then you’ve severely limited the prospects for yourself and that kindly person at the airport. Think of the old-school view of love as pouring a thick layer of cement over a garden that has been planted with a thousand flower bulbs. Although any single flower might still push its way through cracks in the cement and bloom nevertheless, the odds are severely stacked against it. Yet by upgrading your view of love to recognize its full scope, you break up and remove this cement to let a thousand flowers bloom. Positivity resonance exists, whether you adopt a new view of love or not. It remains the ancient life-giving, soul-stretching state that your body craves. The difference you get with an upgrade is whether you are awake to the thousands of opportunities that surround you for fulfilling this craving. When you awaken to this new understanding of your heart’s potential, a new and life-changing emotion is born within you. Do-It-Yourself Gene Expression? Also in the span of time that I’ve written this book, my research team and I have been making new discoveries about how your experiences of love may be either amplified or muffled by the expression of certain genes within your cells. As sketched back in chapter 3, we’ve already discovered that people with higher cardiac vagal tone somehow extract a larger and more immediate positive jolt out of their efforts to practice the style of mediation, LKM, that I’ve featured prominently in part II. Even more inspiring, we found that practicing LKM actually raises people’s vagal tone such that positive feelings and higher vagal tone feed each other over time. In our most recent experiment, we obtained blood samples from study volunteers before they tried out meditation for the first time. By the flip of a coin, they tried either LKM or a different style of mediation, one that does not aim to cultivate loving feelings. Before and immediately after their assigned guided meditation, we asked them to rate the extent of their positive feelings.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  They keep you real busy but you don’t get tired. You’re never tired. And no medicine either. Everyone’s healthy. Strong. You know? Once a week you got to meet with God. Either him or St. Peter. You got to report on how things are going. But there’s no wrong answers in heaven. There’s no report cards . Me? I’m gonna be a ballet dancer or maybe an ice princess like in the Olympics. Just twirl around all day and eat Fruit Roll-Ups . Zillions of puppies … that’s what they got up in heaven. The softest dogs you’ve ever seen. And no poop. I don’t know what happens to the poop but it’s not in heaven. Because heaven’s clean. All those fluffy white clouds. And these zillions of puppies just jumping from cloud to cloud and you get to run and chase them all day . Abby called Vix. “What can I do to help? Would you like something delivered to the editing room … something besides pizza?” Abby kept her in touch, kept them all in touch. Daniel was doing well in his second year at Yale Law, but not as well as he’d thought. Gus was finishing his master’s in journalism at Columbia and had been offered a job in Albuquerque, of all places. Sharkey was turning into a brilliant scientist. And Caitlin, as she already knew, was a latter-day Zelda Fitzgerald with castanets. “Should we start making plans for graduation?” Abby asked. “Are your parents coming? Can we throw a party or do you and Bru have other plans?” She couldn’t begin to think about graduation. She was consumed by her thesis. She discovered creative energies she didn’t even know she had. She’d fall into bed exhausted after midnight and be up at six to start again. She had to keep up with her regular courses, too. Just because it was senior year she wasn’t off the hook. This was Harvard, after all. And a Harvard degree stood for something. Just ask any graduate. Bru said, “I’ll be glad when it’s done. I don’t like anything that keeps us apart.” He asked her to talk sexy to him over the phone. “Tell me what you want me to do to you. Tell me what you’d do to me.” So she told him. Natalie Ponzo talked up Five Minutes in Heaven . It was suggested she send a copy to WGBH. She had an interview with the producers of Nova who offered a summer internship but not a real job. She thanked them and sent a copy to Jocelyn, who was working at an industrial film production house in New York. Jocelyn showed the tape around but cautioned Vix against taking a job with her company. It was a job leading nowhere, she’d discovered. She had to waitress weekends to make ends meet. She’d already given notice.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was a wonderful feeling - but a fearful one, too, for you felt all the time that you didn’t deserve your own good fortune; that you had received it quite by error, in someone else’s place - and that it might be taken from you while your gaze was turned elsewhere. And there was nothing you would not do, I thought, nothing you would not sacrifice, to keep your heart’s desire once you had been given it. I knew that Kitty and I felt just the same - only, of course, about different things. I should have remembered this, later. We unpacked, as I have said, for an hour, and while we worked I caught the sound of various shouts and stirrings in the rest of the house. Now - it was six o‘clock or so - there came the creak of footsteps on the landing beneath ours, and a cry: ‘Miss Butler, Miss Astley!’ It was Mrs Dendy, come to tell us that there was a bit of dinner for us, if we wanted it, in the downstairs parlour - and ‘quite a crowd, besides, that’d like to meet you’. I was hungry, but also weary, and sick of shaking hands and smiling into strangers’ faces; but Kitty whispered that we had better go down, or the other lodgers would think us proud. So we called to Mrs Dendy to give us a moment, and while Kitty changed her dress I combed and re-plaited my hair, and beat the dust from the hem of my skirt into the fireplace, and washed my hands; and then we made our way downstairs. The parlour was a very different room, now, to the one that we had sat and taken tea in on our arrival. The table had been opened out and pulled into the centre of the room, and set for dinner; more importantly, it was ringed with faces, every one of which looked up as we appeared and broke into a smile - the same quick, well-practised smile which shone from all the pictures on the walls. It was as if half-a-dozen of the portraits had come to life and stepped from behind their dusty panes to join Mrs Dendy for supper.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  What struck him most was that negative emotions shout out and drag on, whereas positive emotions are “like the quiet kid in the room that no one ever pays attention to.” This helped him remember that if he could cultivate and savor those quiet and fleeting positive emotions—and help his students do the same—then together they could leverage feeling good to build their resources and resilience. He admitted to me that before he fell into the funk of this all-time low point of his life, all of these ideas had merely remained abstract to him, interesting ideas, to be sure, but they didn’t feel real. Now, together with the support of his supervisors and TFA mentors, they were forming a lifeline. He realized that what needed to change first and foremost was his own attitude. As he put it, “I was not celebrating education in any way.” True, he’d been given a difficult assignment. But he realized that if he made the effort to look at his situation in another way, he could also see that he’d been given “a rare opportunity to actually change these kids’ lives in a positive way, to actually rekindle their love for learning.” He began to see teaching as “a bi- directional relationship. They may be pretty despondent, but look at me. I am certainly not the life of the classroom when I walk in!” That’s when he decided to take a break from teaching basic math to build real relationships with and between his kids. “I said let’s get to know each other, so we played games.” He asked the students to share something about themselves, how many brothers or sisters they had, their thoughts about their town, anything to break the ice. He asked them to write stories about themselves, telling “who they were, what their worst experiences in life had been, what made them happy.” After one kid was bold enough to share his own story, “the stories poured out.” He said it was like penguins lining up along “the edge of an iceberg” all peering down at the water, and then “one jumps in and if it’s safe then everyone else jumps.” The kids began to open up, telling of dads who weren’t around or moms who were struggling to feed the family on food stamps. They shared their fears, alongside their hobbies and hopes. Ty had built his own stock car and had recently won two thousand dollars racing it. Tisha shared that she wanted to be a nurse. They learned to trust their classmates and to honor what each shared. He even devoted a few class sessions to basic lessons from the science of positive emotions, which he attributed to “Dr. Fredrickson” back at Carolina. He asked them to recall a time that they felt down or upset.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Constantine first distinguished himself in the service of Diocletian in the Egyptian and Persian wars; went afterwards to Gaul and Britain, and in the Praetorium at York was proclaimed emperor by his dying father and by the Roman troops. His father before him held a favorable opinion of the Christians as peaceable and honorable citizens, and protected them in the West during the Diocletian persecution in the East. This respectful tolerant regard descended to Constantine, and the good effects of it, compared with the evil results of the opposite course of his antagonist Galerius, could but encourage him to pursue it. He reasoned, as Eusebius reports from his own mouth, in the following manner: "My father revered the Christian God and uniformly prospered, while the emperors who worshipped the heathen gods, died a miserable death; therefore, that I may enjoy a happy life and reign, I will imitate the example of my father and join myself to the cause of the Christians, who are growing daily, while the heathen are diminishing." This low utilitarian consideration weighed heavily in the mind of an ambitious captain, who looked forward to the highest seat of power within the gift of his age. Whether his mother, whom he always revered, and who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in her eightieth year (A.D. 325), planted the germ of the Christian faith in her son, as Theodoret supposes, or herself became a Christian through his influence, as Eusebius asserts, must remain undecided. According to the heathen Zosimus, whose statement is unquestionably false and malicious, an Egyptian, who came out of Spain (probably the bishop Hosius of Cordova, a native of Egypt, is intended), persuaded him, after the murder of Crispus (which did not occur before 326), that by converting to Christianity he might obtain forgiveness of his sins. The first public evidence of a positive leaning towards the Christian religion he gave in his contest with the pagan Maxentius, who had usurped the government of Italy and Africa, and is universally represented as a cruel, dissolute tyrant, hated by heathens and Christians alike,16 called by the Roman people to their aid, Constantine marched from Gaul across the Alps with an army of ninety-eight thousand soldiers of every nationality, and defeated Maxentius in three battles; the last in October, 312, at the Milvian bridge, near Rome, where Maxentius found a disgraceful death in the waters of the Tiber.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Se da la vuelta, cargando el lavaplatos con jabón y encendiéndolo. —Gracias de nuevo por permitir que nos quedemos aquí —digo. Me mira. —Gracias por la cena. Y antes de irme, camino hacia la mesa donde dejé una vela aromatizada encendida. Debería haberle preguntando al respecto. Puede que no le gusten los aromas tontos en su casa. Inclinándome sobre la mesa, cierro los ojos, inhalo y pido mi deseo de siempre. Qué mañana sea mejor que hoy. Y soplo, casi inmediatamente oliendo el fuerte aroma del humo que flota en el aire por la mecha apagada. Siempre es el mismo deseo. Cada vela. Cada vez. Quiero una vida de la que no tenga que tomar nunca vacaciones. Esa es mi meta. Excepto por el fósforo que apagué en el teatro. Pedí algo diferente esa noche. Cuando abro los ojos, veo a Pike observándome. Rápidamente se endereza y se da la vuelta. Y mientras salgo de la cocina y me dirijo hacia las escaleras en la sala de estar, dejo mi revista en el extremo de la mesa junto al sofá. Ahora alguien vive aquí.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Pondré esto en el garaje —dice—. Voy a tomar una ducha. ¿Tal vez podamos comenzar a plantar por la mañana? Su mirada parece buscar la mía, y me quedo sin respiración por un momento ante su mirada. Finalmente asiento, dándome la vuelta. Camina de nuevo hacia la casa y luego escucho su voz detrás de mí. —Y si necesitamos más suministros, solo avísame. De todos modos mañana tengo que ir a Home Depot 6 . —Está bien —susurro. Y luego lo miro sobre el hombro. —Y no eres viejo, ¿sabes? —grito. Me mira, con diversión en su mirada. —Lo suficientemente viejo como para tener mi propia opinión. Y eso estuvo mal de mi parte. —Gracias. Los músculos en su brazo se flexionan mientras sujeta mi maleta, y no puedo evitar deslizar la mirada por los tatuajes a lo largo de ellos. Se ven ligeramente descoloridos, como si se los hubiera hecho cuando era un adolescente. ¿Cómo era a la edad de Cole? Es difícil imaginárselo como... bueno, un chico, supongo. Es muy serio. Casi en exceso. Pero es sincero. —La próxima vez que necesites un aventón... o cualquier cosa —dice—, ¿prometes que me llamarás? Asiento de nuevo y me giro de vuelta hacia las semillas, emocionada por el verano que se acerca. 6 Home Depot: Es una empresa minorista estadounidense de mejoramiento del hogar, bricolaje y materiales de construcción.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  If people like me don’t work, it’s because they look at the world, at all the injustice and the muck, and all they see is a nation falling in upon itself, and taking them with it. But the muck has new things growing out of it - wonderful things! - new habits of working, new kinds of people, new ways of being alive and in love ...’ Love again. I put a finger to the scar upon my cheek, where Dickie’s doctor’s book had caught it. Florence bent her head to gaze at the baby, as he lay sighing upon her chest. ‘In another twenty years,’ she went on quietly, ‘imagine how the world will be! It will be a new century. Cyril will be a young man - nearly, but not quite, as old as I am now. Imagine the things he’ll see, the things he’ll do ...’ I looked at her, and then at him; and for a moment I felt almost able to see with her across the years to the queer new world that would have Cyril in it, as a man... As I looked, she shifted in her seat, reached a hand out to the bookcase at her side, and drew a volume from the bulging shelves. It was Leaves of Grass: she turned its pages, and found a passage that she seemed to know. ‘Listen to this’ she said. She began to read aloud. Her tone was low, and rather self-conscious; but it quivered with passion - I had never heard such passion in her voice, before. ‘0 mater! 0 fils!’ she read. ‘0 brood continental! 0 flowers of the prairies! 0 space boundless! 0 hum of mighty products! 0 you teeming cities! 0 so invincible, turbulent, proud! 0 race of the future! 0 women! O fathers! O you men of passion and storm! 0 beauty! 0 yourself! 0 you bearded roughs! 0 bards! 0 all those slumberers! 0 arouse! the dawn-bird’s throat sounds shrill! Do you not hear the cock crowing?’ She sat still for a moment, gazing down at the page; then she raised her eyes to mine, and I saw with surprise that they were gleaming with unspilled tears. She said, ‘Don’t you think that marvellous, Nancy?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Every night, almost, I had woken sweating from dreams in which I presented myself at her door, with my bags all packed and my hat upon my head, and she looked at me in wonder, and frowned, or laughed with derision; or else I arrived too late at the station, and had to chase the train along the track while Kitty and Mr Bliss gazed at me from their carriage window, and would not lean outside to pull me in ... That night at the Palace, however, she led me to one side, and pressed my hand, and was quite as kind and excited as she had been before. ‘I’ve had a letter from Mr Bliss,’ she said. ‘He has found us rooms in a house in a place called Brixton - a place so full, he says, of music-hall people and actors that they call it “GreasePaint Avenue”.’ Grease-Paint Avenue! I saw it instantly and it was marvellous, a street set out like a make-up box, with narrow, gilded houses, each one with a different coloured roof; and ours would be number 3 - with a chimney the colour of Kitty’s carmined lips! ‘We are to catch the two o’clock train on Sunday,’ she went on, ‘and Mr Bliss himself will meet us at the station, in a carriage. And I’m due to start the very next day at the Star Music Hall, in Bermondsey.’ ‘The Star,’ I said. ‘That’s a lucky name.’ She smiled. ‘Let’s hope so. Oh, Nan, let’s only hope so!’ My last morning at home was - like every last morning in history, I suppose - a sad one. We breakfasted together, the five of us, and were bright enough; but there was a horrible sense of expectation in the house that made anything except sighing, and drifting aimlessly from job to job, seem quite impossible. By eleven o’clock I felt as penned and as stifled as a rat in a box, and made Alice walk with me to the beach, and hold my shoes and stockings while I stood at the water’s edge one final time. But even this little ritual was a disappointing one. I put my hand to my brow and gazed at the glittering bay, at the distant fields and hedges of Sheppey, at the low, pitch-painted houses of the town, and the masts and cranes of the harbour and the shipyard.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Maybe she is not ready for the deadness to be killed, or maybe, against all odds, she is. Maybe you can give her something from deep within to find or do or fight for that will break the trance for her. You’ll have to find this first within you, though. And then you’ll have it to give away. This woman may get to wake up. And then she will have something to give, a song to sing. Maybe it won’t be a song exactly, but maybe just a little tune, a calliope tune, the tune of survival. PublicationAll right, let’s talk about publication. Let’s talk about the myth of publication. Say you’ve finished your book, or a draft of the book, or a whole lot of stories, and you send them off to your agent, if you have one, or to a friend’s agent, or to an agent you’ve found listed in the Yellow Pages or in the Literary Market Place . Say you actually already have an editor somewhere, or an editor who once wrote you an admiring rejection letter, so you send your book or stories to him or her and to a couple of friends. As I’ve mentioned, I’m one of those people who feels beside herself the day after I’ve stuck the manuscript in the mail. It can’t have even arrived and already I’m feeling bitter and resentful about what cold, lazy, sadistic slime I’m surrounded by. There are other writers, and you may be one of them, who just push back their sleeves and get to work on the next piece. I could never be close to a person like this, but I know they exist. Anyway, if you are like me, you wait and wait and check your mail ten times each day, and feel devastated and rejected every hour that there is no response. Finally, if you are lucky, a week later you get a note from your agent’s assistant that the manuscript has in fact arrived, and maybe one of the friends has called to say that he or she has read part of it and that it is just terrific and not to worry, but you go ahead and have a small breakdown anyhow, waiting for your agent and editor to call and tell you that it’s brilliant. Every time the phone rings, you sing, “Let it please be him, oh, dear God, it must be him.” But it’s not him, and then you die and go on a massive eating binge and think about what phonies most of your friends are. And then you calm down. You go for a walk.