The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections Read Online Free PDF Page A

breast cancer or, equally threatening, ovarian cancer or metastatic melanoma—and they have survived. Most of these courageous women say the same thing: The hard lessons learned when facing death become less front-of-mind over time. Just as your hair grows back after chemo, once you are “cured” you largely revert to the same personality traits and behavioral patterns you had before. No one knows whether this is part of our survival mechanism or if it’s simply our happiness set point reasserting itself.
    Michelle, a Los Angeles–based working mother, now in her midforties, who survived a life-threatening bout with colon cancer ten years ago, explains it this way:
    You know you’re cured and healthy and things are back to normal when you blow up at the little things. It’s like a blessing, a welcomeback to the land of the living. Because if I can get pissed off at my twelve-year-old son for not making his bed, we both know we’re back to normal. I’m just Mom, I’m not Cancer Mom, who could be dying soon. I’d love to tell people you embrace a lighter, brighter way of living once you go through something like that, but the truth is, ultimately you’re just you again.
    She adds that you do gain a new, bigger perspective, which puts the irritations in context, and it’s all just part of a normal, happy life. Michelle says that she tries to remember not to stress out, but adds: “There’s nothing wrong with the ups and downs, the silly aggravations. I know I’m lucky and grateful, but it doesn’t mean I have to feel that way every second.” So the lesson seems to be that “normal” means having ups and downs. The gift is to appreciate both.
    It is possible to learn to love your life and the people in it without having a brush with death. Consider the poignant contrasts in Catherine’s life and marriage. Catherine and her husband, Dan Labow, both went to medical school but chose different paths to helping people—Dan is a renowned surgical oncologist specializing in one of the deadliest of cancers: pancreatic; Catherine is a respected psychiatrist treating women grappling with problems ranging from relationship crises and depression, to managing family and career, including pregnancy, infertility, and motherhood.
    When Dan meets a new patient, someone recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he is greeting someone who may have more hope than time, while Catherine’s new patients may arrive with more time than hope.
    Imagine that their new patients could switch places for even a day. How would their outlook change if they thought they could possibly die within a year or two? Would they abandon their daily rituals? Change everything? Change nothing? If you could imagine for just one minute that today is one of the last ones you’ll spend on the planet, would you appreciate the little things or disdain them? What would you feel most? If we had to predict your answer, it would be: gratitude, overwhelming love, empathy, and appreciation. But you couldn’t sustain it every minute (foreven that one day!), since that would be impossible. It’s simply not the human condition.
    This idea is poignantly dramatized in my favorite play, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town , where the mundane takes on extra meaning after the naive young character Emily has died, but gets to relive one day of her life. She chooses her twelfth birthday, since it was such a typical yet joy-filled day. She doesn’t want to choose a significant day, such as when she got married or learned she was pregnant. At one point she asks the Stage Manager (the play’s narrator) if human beings ever appreciate “every, every minute.” He answers: Saints and poets, some moments only. It’s impossible to appreciate “every, every minute,” but if we’re lucky we can appreciate some moments.
    In my life, I try to identify these moments whenever I’m able. I call these “perfect moments” because they make it possible for me to see that my life is