Article first published as The Key to Happiness: Running with the Bulls on Blogcritics.

How many people are guilty of ruining a beautiful day because they choose to let worry or past memories trouble them? I know I am. Take yesterday, for example; Instead of grabbing a beach blanket, heading out in the sun and enjoying the sounds of the ocean, I spent my day-off worried about things that are out of my control; things that may or may not happen. Let’s just say, I spent yesterday uninspired and everyone knows inspiration is appreciated by writers and people struggling to get out of bed.

“Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.”~ William Feather

Since my cancer diagnosis, I’ve been worried. I’ve been focused on regretting past mistakes, “stuck” in the “if I had to do it all again” mantra and singing the “what will happen if” rhapsody. I think many people can relate. The anxiety doesn’t have to be caused by an unwanted health diagnosis; life challenges everyone. Problems are inescapable.

Remember the film Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams (playing the character of John Keating) says; “’Carpe diem’-seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”?

Life is about now; living today. Even George Harrison, one of the Beatles, understood the concept of Carpe diem. In an interview, Harrison had said:

“It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.”

One Story About Carpe diem:

My friend, John, shared a story with me. He described what it was like for his father, Miguel, to move his wife and kids from Portugal to the United States, many years ago. John (translated from Portuguese from Joao, his birth name) was only two-years-old when he came to the United States. He shared that during his childhood, he didn’t see his dad much because his father was always working. John’s dad worked hard to support his family, sometimes working seven days out of the week.

Despite the lack of family time and no real vacations, John’s dad, Miguel, made great plans for his retirement. Instead of “living for today”, Miguel lived for future days, the days following his retirement, when all the sacrifices he had made for his family would finally be rewarded. He would travel with his wife, enjoy the ocean and read books that he never had time to read. He’d be able to spend time with his children, making up for all the family time lost when he was working over-time in construction. But life had other plans.

One month after retiring, Miguel was diagnosed with cancer and died suddenly. His plans for the future never came to fruition and all the years of hard work and sacrifice amounted to broken dreams for his wife; dreams that swirled without rhythm, like dust in a wind storm.

This tragic event greatly affected my friend, John. The death of his father changed the way he viewed life. Life was no longer about planning for the future but for living in the present. Life was not meant to be spent re-hashing the past or worrying about the future. After Miguel’s death, John viewed life as a series of choices made daily: to live in the present, cherish the little things and be free to act and take chances.

Following his father’s death, John had a tattoo placed on his back and it reads “Carpe Diem”. Then, spontaneously, John planned a trip to Spain, taking unplanned time out from work, to fulfill a childhood dream of his; to run with the bulls.

Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters

During a phone conversation with John last night, he had asked me how I had spent my day off so I told him. After listening to my response, John grew quiet.  Then, my friend said to me: “You know, there are people worse off. You wasted a beautiful day. You could have spent it being happy. “I run with the bulls.” That’s my philosophy. No matter what, that’s what I do. You’re worrying about things that may not happen. Be happy. Learn to run with the bulls!”

Running with the bulls; an act of freedom, taking a chance, trying something new, having a mind of one’s own, not letting fear stand in your way, living for the moment. It’s like playing the part of John Keating in that one scene from Dead Poets Society.  Shouldn’t every day be “extraordinary”?

The happiest people live in the present. It’s a lesson I need to remember.

Related Reading:

The Art Of Now: Six Steps to Living In The Present

7 Awesome Reasons to Be Present and How to Do It

Living in the moment really does make people happier

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A creative piece on recovering from heartache…

What is it about the rain? Knocking on my bedroom window, like a desperate lover, begging for someone to listen to his sad song. Damn him for waking me! How I hate his persistent tapping. Sleep is the only antidote for what ails me, but today the rain seems determined to rob me blind, stealing this new found freedom.

Rubbing my eyes, I blink at the soft filtering light, streaming in through loosely, drawn curtains. Then it hits me; that familiar, sharp pain in the pit of my stomach. It’s been waiting for me, lurking in early morning shadows. Daylight, now my enemy, makes every betrayal and broken promise more visible.

The tapping on the window continues. I try to ignore it, roll over, and tightly wrap the Irish wool cover around my bare skin. Lying still, I listen to the rain hitting black shingles, and the melody becomes hypnotic. I recognize the familiar song. It has visited me before, but today, its gentle rhythm brings comfort, the way a mother’s humming quiets a newborn. For a brief moment, I feel content, serenaded by nature’s lullaby.

Wrestling the tightrope between sleep and consciousness, my mind wanders. Mental snapshots share images of a skinny, small girl, jumping in mud puddles and hot, summer days playing at a seashore cottage. In the shade of a backyard willow tree, the same little girl builds primitive forts, made out of lawn chairs and beach towels.

“Every little girl knows about love.

It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases.” ~Francoise Sagan

Innocence, a time of simplicity, is when happiness means catching fireflies in glass jelly jars, on muggy, summer afternoons. Sorrow means not finding a quarter in time to stop the ice cream man’s truck. Back then, I was convinced a handsome prince would find me. I never questioned the possibility of my life not being filled with sweet lollipops and sunshine. Every day, on my way home from school, I skipped down a crooked dirt path that lead to my family’s front porch. I made sure never to step on cracks, for that would bring bad luck.

Suddenly, my memories are interrupted by a torrential downpour. I begin to feel the coldness of my lonely king sized bed. Once again, I pull my bed covers up, just enough to feel the wool itch my chin, and without warning, I’m reminded of him, on the days he didn’t shave. Like a bucket of raindrops, the weight of my heartache sweeps me away in a fast moving emotional current. The magnitude of its power is frightening. Like a playground bully, ignoring pathetic pleas to be left alone, it chokes, taunts, and refuses to leave me.

Feeling helpless, I knew It was time to raise the white flag and surrender. Exactly two months after he left, I allowed myself to cry. Sobbing, like a baby, a strange, soft whisper was vaguely audible. It was that little girl, calling me, still stubborn and headstrong, refusing to be drowned out by the storm. Like secrets whispered in the schoolyard, her message distracted me. Slowly, I composed myself. I wanted to hear what she had to say.

With the honesty of a child, but the wisdom of a grown woman, she shared her powerful message with me:

“Tread softly, gently. Allow yourself to grieve, but within reason. Don’t be overindulgent. Stand tall, walk proudly, and refuse to let your spirit be broken. Spend time with the people you love, pray every day, and never forget to take care of you. Keep busy, move forward, live one day at a time. Today, take baby steps if you need to. But remember, in time, you will travel this road filled with cracks, swiftly, with the grace and beauty of a wild stallion, roaming free in a green open field. So, hold on my friend and be strong. You don’t need a handsome prince to rescue you. Slay your own dragons and learn to love yourself more. Nurture the little girl inside you. Ask her to show you how easy it is to play and dance with a light heart. Never Stop looking for rainbows. You will love again….Believe…

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Fenway Park is the oldest Major League Baseball stadium in the United States, having opened on April 20, 1912. On that date, the Red Sox played against the New York Highlanders (later renamed the New York Yankees) and celebrated a 7-6 victory over them. Fittingly, the Red Sox will mark 100 years of baseball at Fenway Park today when they play against the Yankees in a three part series.

If you live in the Boston area, you know that the local media has been buzzing about Fenway this week. From the Red Sox letting off 100 balloons with tickets inside the park (Read more…) to the free 10 hour Open House at Fenway Park, where nearly 54,000 people were able to be part of history; walking the warning track, touching the Green Monster, sitting in the dugouts, even peeking inside the manual scoreboard. (Read more…)

The Boston news reminded Bostonians this week that Fenway Park is special. Some of the interesting historical facts included:

• Fenway’s original capacity was 35,000. Between 1912 and 2004, Fenway’s capacity had fluctuated between 33,000 and 36,298.
• The grandstand section has the original seats, 15 inches across, packed together and the wood on them is splintering. (I should know–I got a splinter from sitting on one of them!)
• One red seat stands out amongst a sea of green seats in the right field bleachers. That’s where Ted Williams hit the longest homerun in Fenway history, a whopping 502 feet, on June 9^th, 1946. The ball crashed through the hat of a Yankees fan sitting in his seat. After he “woke up” he was asked by reporters if he would switch his allegiance to the Sox after being hit. He said that he would and the next day’s newspaper headlines read, “Williams Knocks Sense into Yankees Fan”. The green seat the man sat in was then replaced with a red seat (Seat 21, Row 37, Section 42). The original chair is in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.
• Between 1912 and 1933 Fenway had a slope, running up to the centerfield fence. It was nicknamed “Duffy’s Cliff” after Red Sox left fielder Duffy Lewis had become skilled at running up the slope to make plays.
• In 1936, the Sox constructed a 23 foot net atop the Monster, located in left field, to protect the windows of businesses on Lansdowne Street
• After the 1975 World Series, the Sox added padding to the lower portions of the left and center field walls, after a play in the 1975 World Series. Fred Lynn had crashed into the padding-less walls to make a play.

There are many more interesting facts that make Fenway Park a legendary field. But if you’re from Boston, you know what makes Fenway is its devoted fans. Listening to scalpers, standing outside the ball park, shouting with their thick South Boston (Southie) accents tells you where you are. You’re in Boston and Boston loves Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox for the past 100 years.

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istock photo

Teaching PE last week, one of my kindergarteners (we’ll call him John) seemed unusually despondent and depressed. He didn’t want to participate in the soccer drills and when I tried to encourage him to join in, he responded with “I can’t do it. I don’t want to.”

Well, it’s no wonder that John was unable to be carefree like his classmates. His mom recently tried to commit suicide and he hasn’t seen her for weeks. His dad is MIA and he’s temporarily living with relatives that he doesn’t know very well.

How does a five year old weather this storm? For that matter, how do children today deal with any trauma or set back, be it a parent’s divorce, the death of a close relative, or bullying at school? How do you teach kids, like John, to adapt-bend and not break- during hard times?

A New York Times article (March 2001) written by Robert Sullivan posed this same question. In What Makes a Child Resilient?, Sullivan wrote:

“A resilient child has some sense of mastery of his own life, and if he gets frustrated by a mistake, he still feels he can learn from the mistake….Barry Plummer, a clinical psychologist, says that grownups should ‘encourage a kid to master something even if he stinks at school–a sport, music, someplace he can go where he is of value. This can build a pocket of resilience.” (Read more…)

Research has been conducted into childhood resilience. Masten, Best and Garmezy (1990) defined it as the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances.

But why do some kids see the light traveling through the dark tunnel and others get trapped in the darkness? 

Can resiliency be taught? 

Darlene Kordich Hall, PhD and Jennifer Pearson’s article, Resilience-giving children the skills to bounce back, suggest that resiliency can be taught. They write: 

“Children can be taught to challenge their thinking so that they learn to bounce back from adversity. Training early childhood educators to model resilient thinking behaviors in childcare settings has had a positive impact on the educators, the centers and the children in their care. As a society, we need to introduce children to skills that will help them think in a more resilient way when confronted with difficulties. To do this, we need to increase public awareness of the impact of adult thinking styles on the developing thinking patterns of children.”

Hall and Pearson add:

“Research suggests that resilient thinking patterns can be learned by adults and children.¹⁰ Skills that aid habitual use of more accurate and flexible thinking can be absorbed by children from a very early age and can optimize development of resilience.¹¹

The ability to reframe negative events by searching for a perspective that is simultaneously truthful and favorable helps people maintain a realistically optimistic perspective.¹³ For some people, stress and adversity typically create feelings of helplessness and wanting to give up – in others, challenges trigger problem solving, learning and growth.¹⁴”

In their article, they list several thinking skills that promote accurate and flexible thinking including:

• recognizing that our beliefs about adversity affect how we feel, and consequently what we do
• challenging our beliefs about why things happen – uncovering our thinking style
• developing an awareness of common thinking traps or errors
• understanding that our core beliefs about the world may be preventing us from taking opportunities
• gathering evidence to dispute/support beliefs – generating other alternatives
• putting stresses/adversities into perspective
• calming and focusing

 (Read more…)

What can parents do to help build resiliency?

Robert Brooks, Ph.D. and Sam Goldstein, Ph. D. wrote,10 Ways To Make Your Children More Resilient. They list ways parents can help children develop resiliency which includes teaching children to problem solve and make decisions, being empathetic to the child and actively listening. (Read more…)

Gaston Bachelard, the French Philosopher, once said:

 ”Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.”

Since life will not only be filled with pleasant events, it’s important that we teach children how to reframe negative events and learn the thinking skills necessary to weather life storms.

References:

Oxford Review of Education

Volume 25, Issue 3, 1999

Childhood Resilience: Review and critique of literature

Sue Howard, John Dryden & Bruce Johnson

pages 307-323

¹⁰ Reivich, K. & Shatté, A. (2002); Seligman, M. E. P. (1991). Learned Optimism. New York: Pocket Books; Seligman, M. E. P., Reivich, K., Jaycox, L. & Gillham, J. (1995). The Optimistic Child. New York: Harper Perennial.

¹¹ Seligman, M. E. P., Reivich, K., Jaycox, L. & Gillham, J. (1995); Shatté, A. J. (2002). Presentation at the Reaching IN…Reaching OUT Training Day, November 16, 2002, Toronto.

¹³ Ashford, B.E. & Kreiner, G.E. (1999). “How can you do it?” Dirty work and the challenge of constructing a positive identity. Academy of Management Review, 24, 413-434; Schneider, S. (2001). In search of realistic optimism. American Psychologist, 56 (3), 250- 261.

¹⁴ Werner, E. & Smith, R. (2001). Journeys from childhood to midlife: risk, resilience, and recovery. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press; Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E. P., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: A critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97, (1), 49-74.

¹⁵ Reivich, K. & Shatté, A. (2002).

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2012-04-03

All too frequently, the evening news will highlight a missing child, teen or young adult. Missing persons are so prevalent in this country, that ABC has recently launched a new series called Missing. It stars Ashley Judd who plays a kick-ass mom, searching for her missing son in Europe.

Jessica Ronhock

Although missing people are unfortunately an everyday occurrence, the tragic reality hits home when it happens to someone you know. When I learned that Terry Ronhock’s daughter had gone missing, I just couldn’t fathom what Terry must be going through. Terry was the sweet, soft spoken Kindergarten teacher that I had taught with for 5 years, at a school located on Cape Cod. I taught first grade beside her and admired her love for teaching, her caring and nurturing nature and her strong, unbreakable spirit. Learning about Terry’s situation made me cringe. I had to wonder how it was possible that Terry or any parent of a missing child functions day to day and manages to cope. (To read Terry’s story, click Navaho Times).

In June of 2009, Susan Donaldson James wrote an article for ABC News on this very topic. In her article, Missing Child: Nightmare That Never Ends, she wrote:

“Parents of missing children say that the pain is excruciating, and psychologists confirm that the loss can be even greater than when a child dies.” In her article she states that siblings of the missing person suffer equally.

Sheila L. Stephen wrote an informative article, The Missing or Abducted Child, in which she discusses the Amber Alert and shares a missing child timeline. The article provides excellent advice on what parents should do after they first learn that their child or adolescent has gone missing. (To read more…)

There are several organizations offering support to families of missing children. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) is one of them. It’s a nonprofit organization, located in Alexandria, Virginia, and provides information and resources to law enforcement, parents, children and other professionals. It has a 24-hour hot line, a Cyber-Tip-Line, training opportunities, links to education and news, and other important support.

Team Hope is another  organization providing support and resources to families. What makes this group special is that Team HOPE matches families with experienced and trained volunteers, who are often family members with children missing or who have been sexually exploited. The volunteers have first-hand experience in living the nightmare of having a child missing. Who better to offer emotional support?

In Terry’s case, time ran out. No organization would be able to help her now. She received bad news this week: Her 21-year-old daughter’s body was discovered by hikers at the bottom of a ravine in Arizona. Authorities are not sure what caused the accident. The Cape Cod Times article reported Terry saying “She’s in a good place now. Wherever she is, God is taking care of her.” This sounds very much like Terry; always finding the positive in something painful and unfair.

I plan on attending Terry’s daughter’s wake, but what will I say to Terry and her family? For that matter, what does anyone say to a parent who has experienced this type of loss or is living the nightmare of missing a child?

Words will not be enough but my prayers go out to Terry and her family, and all families who have suffered through the reality of not knowing where their child is.

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 Do you know someone with low self-esteem? Do they blame their mother?

Self-esteem is not something that only affects adults. It’s a life time tug-of-war, beginning at birth, between how we see our self and how we

believe the world sees us.

Do you think it matters if people see us as “the cup half empty”, instead of the “glass half-full”?

I used to believe it was. I would measure my worth on how other people treated me.  What was the end result?  Not so good.

As a kid with ADHD, my mom sent me daily subliminal messages that I interpreted as; “this girl is unlovable”. It wasn’t my mom’s fault. I was a difficult child and maybe my mother wasn’t the best one to raise me do to her temperament and less-than-perfect patience, but we both did the best that we could to get along. Unfortunately, years of playing the black sheep in my family took its toll and my self-esteem suffered.

I think it even influenced who I chose for a marriage partner. The man was controlling and emotionally abusive but in a strange way, he reminded me of my mother. In my subconscious, he was “home” and that is what attracted me to him. After 13 unhappy years, of allowing him to make me feel ‘less than’, I sought help. I thought I was seeing someone for depression, but this expert diagnosed me with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and treated me with EMDR.

I think of the treatment as a “re-boot”. Like a computer, our brains hold memories and store them away. Like a computer that eventually shuts down, our brain can’t work up to full capacity, because the files or memory chips have been stored in all the wrong places. EMDR is the re-boot that gets the person on the right track, re-organizing the misplaced files into the correct folders.

I learned that my low self-esteem was partly due to my temperament, partly due to years of emotional abuse, and partly due to me seeing myself using a mirror filled with cracks. The cracks were collected over the years; placed by every criticism, every roll of the eye, every insult.

After EMDR, I began loving myself again, and two years later, I divorced my husband.

Do I still struggle with low self-esteem?

Sometimes, but I think it’s a life-long journey and we have to keep working at being our own best friend. This is just my own opinion.

Heck, I’m a writer so what do I know?

That’s why I researched the topic today and wrote another post on my own blog that I named, “Building Your Child’s Self Esteem”. That article references experts and gives parenting tips to help children develop and recover from lost self-esteem.

If you know a child, or someone raising a child, who is struggling with low self-esteem, I hope you will share that article.

And remember:  “The best mirror is an old friend.”~Proverb

Learn how to become your own best-old- friend and see yourself using a mirror without cracks. Just sayin’…

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