Wishful Thinking

 Years ago, my twenty-something niece, Catie, introduced a little wishing game to us when she would stay at our house, usually to  babysit my kids.  When the clock displayed time by repeating the same numbers, it was time to make a wish.  So at 3:33, it was wish time, as it was at 10:10 or 5:55. Bemused by the simple magic of the idea, we made our wishes.  This little game stuck.  So, at the turn of the new year, when my daughter noticed that the time was 1:11 on 01/01/11, I texted Catie to alert her. She replied, in kind, saying she and her friends just made some powerful wishes on this notable, momentary event.  I smiled at the sweet simplicity of it all. (I also marveled at how perfectly a text can connect me to loved ones.)

It made me consider wishing and the tricks we may choose to employ as vehicles that contain our intentions, sending them out to the universe - what do we hope for? dream for? wish for? and why?  So many toasts over the holidays held hopes and desires at the end of a raised glass.  Christmas cards and holiday greetings filled our home with all sorts of wishes- a merry, happy, peaceful, blessed, holy, safe, healthy, joyful holiday.  I love the change in how we greet one another in December - we go from Good Morning or Good Evening to Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanukkah - we are transformed into veritable wishing machines. All of those aspirations shower the molecules that bounce and collide invisibly around us and make me think anything is possible.

Do we really feel the power of making wishes, whether we blast them out into the universe or keep them protected in our psyche? I think wishes and prayers are twins separated at birth.  They contain the same bones and wiring, yet travel different paths by their users. I try not to get mired in wishing for actual things - like being one of the lottery winners in the recent $355 million lottery jackpot. (Of course, actually buying a ticket would have helped nudge that potential wish along.) How many of us staring into a birthday cake of candles have really taken that moment to make a wish worthy of the day we arrived on the planet?  I become so overwhelmed by hearing the voices of loved ones singing the familiar birthday song for little old me that the wishing part gets jammed up in my mind.  The singing chokes me up every time.     

When we wish, are we practical or does wishing by its very nature impel us to go toward the fantastical, beyond our every expectation?  Are we trying to push away some, what I like to call, 'bad ju ju' that may be weighing too heavily in our lives?  Do we ask for the tools to make the negative go positive or do we bottom line it, and say, "make this happen?"  And how do we react when our wishes don't come true? What is it in us that gives us what it takes to survive life's unfortunate events?

A recent article in the New York Times Health section reports on a few studies done recently regarding the role that any number of adversities may play in our resiliency. 

Titled "On Road to Recovery, Past Adversity Provides a Map," there was a surprising 

outcome in one of the cited studies. Of the 2,000 people studied between the ages of 18 and 101, 194 people answered "none of the above" to questions regarding upsetting life events that happened to them before and during the study. Of the 37 choices offered, which included but were not limited to, divorce, death of a loved one, a serious illness, 194 people answered they had not experienced any of the events.

Nothing.  Nada. Zippo.

Now this got my attention. The article notes, "We wondered: Who are these people who have managed to go through life with nothing bad happening to them?” Dr. Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, said.  “Are they hyper-conscientious? Socially isolated? Just young? Or otherwise unique?”  It turns out the answer to these inquiries is no. These individuals had a sense of well being that "was about the same, on average, as people who had suffered up to a dozen memorable blows."

Interestingly, it was the individuals who were somewhere in the middle of having had anywhere from six to twelve negative life events who were the most resilient. The article notes, "In short, the findings suggest that mental toughness is something like the physical strength: It cannot develop without exercise, and it breaks down when overworked."  People with twelve or more of these events struggled the most with their ability to cope and had the ragged emotional edges to prove it. 

While the degree of suffering will vary from person to person, and event to event, the studies suggest that recalling the tools used to weather difficulties creates a coping memory that can serve us time and again. If we decide to see what we learned about ourselves and how we built some emotional muscle, the next difficulty along life's road may be more manageable.   

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychologist and author, who suffered the devastating mind and body cruelty of the Holocaust wrote in his book, "Man's Search for Meaning," that "everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."   Frankl noted that we are not just human beings, "we are deciding beings."

Making our wishes come true is within our grasp when we decide how we are going to choose our way. We decide our thoughts and our feelings.  This is more than wishful thinking and loads more powerful.  Here is to a thought-filled 2011.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/health/04mind.html?src=me&ref=general