A chance meeting might seem like a fluke, but as Ben Sherwood explains, scientific research backs up the notion that you can influence your own destiny. Step one: Smile.
On a Saturday morning February 1994, Colleen Seifert, PhD, woke up early and ate her usual breakfast: half a bagel, fruit, and coffee. She walked her Russian wolfhound, Bandit, and tidied her apartment. Seifert was an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Michigan, and for six years her life had been entirely focused on a single goal: earning tenure. She was a work machine, putting in seven-day weeks and sleeping fewer than six hours each night. Even when she left the lab, her mind was consumed with academic research. "I couldn't walk into a shopping mall without feeling I should have been at work," she says. Her big indulgence was running errands on Saturday mornings.

On this Saturday morning, however, her life was about to catapult in a new direction. Seifert's first stop was Pittsfield Cleaners, a couple of blocks away from her home. It was a splendid, sunny day, she remembers; the university was on spring break, and the streets of Ann Arbor were quiet. She pulled up to the dry cleaner's drive-through window and handed over a tangle of clothes. The man at the cash register sorted through the items and held up a hot pink blouse.

"Is this a dress?" he asked.

"It's a shirt," Seifert said. "I wouldn't wear a dress that short."

The man had a handsome face, and dimples; he wore his hair in a ponytail. "If you've got it, flaunt it," he said with a smile.

Seifert was 34 years old, and it had been a long time since a man had even noticed her. Her 60-hour workweeks left neither time nor energy for taking care of herself. She was overweight and overstressed. She hadn't been on a date in more than two years. Friends had tried to fix her up, but when it came to flirting, she was "out of practice." And yet when the man asked for her phone number to include on the dry cleaning ticket, she blurted out: "So? Are you going to call me?"

He looked confused but recovered quickly. "Sure," he said. "I'll do that."

Flustered but "flushed with the daring" of what she'd said, Seifert drove off. She figured the man would never call, but it was thrilling to have done something so out of character. And then, around 7 o'clock that evening, the phone rang. It was him. He introduced himself—his name was Zeke Montalvo—and asked Seifert to go to the movies that night. She said yes. They had a good time. It turned out that Montalvo was only 25 and hadn't gone to college, but the two started dating. Then they fell in love. And six years after they met, on a cold Christmas Eve at a house by a lake, Montalvo proposed with an heirloom ring. They were married the next month.

At the most unlikely time, in the least romantic place, Seifert met the man of her dreams. It was a random event that changed her life forever. A classic chance encounter. Or was it?

Seifert's academic specialty is cognitive psychology, the science of why people think the way they do. And to understand what really happened the day she met Montalvo, she says you need to start the day before her trip to the cleaners.

That afternoon, in her office, she had received a bouquet of flowers from the chair of the psychology department. The note read, "Congratulations! Your tenure has been approved." If someone else had been in the room, she might have hugged them, but she was alone, so she simply cried with relief. After six years of single-minded obsession, her work had paid off. To celebrate, she went for a drink with a colleague that night. But even as she sat sipping her margarita, a feeling of anticlimax set in. She wondered if the achievement had been worth the sacrifice.

When Seifert awoke the next morning, everything felt different, as though a weight had been lifted. "I don't have to go to work today," she thought. Drinking coffee in her breakfast nook, she asked herself: "Now what? How do I want my life to go? How do I make something good happen?" She told herself that her future started today, and that there had to be something better. She promised herself that in 10 years, she wasn't going to be alone like this. From now on, she would celebrate important occasions with a crowd of friends, not just one colleague. All of a sudden, she had new goals, and she recognized that she would need to take specific steps to reach them. An introvert by nature, she decided to interact more with people. She would shake their hands, look them in the eye, engage in livelier conversation.

For Seifert, these weren't just idle thoughts. Through her research, she had come up with a concept she called "predictive encoding"—the anticipation of when a particular piece of knowledge is going to be useful—and it described exactly what she was doing as she sat at her kitchen table. Research has shown that most people aren't very good at recalling information—or intentions—when they need to. For instance, you know you're out of toilet paper, you go to the store to pick some up, and somehow you manage to come home without it. Or you know you want to meet someone and fall in love, but when you're out and about interacting with people, you somehow manage to come home without having connected with anyone. Though you know what you want, Seifert says, that knowledge doesn't always come to mind at the right time to guide your behavior. But if, when you're thinking about what you want, you imagine the situations in which you'll need to remember it, you're more likely to succeed. Preparing your mind for a certain behavior increases (by as much as 50 percent) the chance that you'll pull that behavior off. And that's what Seifert was attempting: to prepare—or encode into memory—her plans to change her behavior in a way that might change her future. By imagining a new role as a "people person," she was giving herself a better chance of behaving like one whenever the opportunity arose.

Of course, if anyone had told her she would go on a date that night with a man who worked at the dry cleaner, she would have thought it preposterous. Still, even if she wasn't expecting to meet Mr. Right when she pulled up to the drive-through window, she did know she wanted to engage the world differently. And she believes she met her husband because she had mentally prepared for a chance encounter. By seeding her mind with the vision of more connected and fulfilling relationships, Seifert says, she gave her mind instant access to this information when she ran into someone new. And that, in turn, helped her change her behavior and take action.

Seifert isn't alone in believing that if you prepare yourself to make the most of chance encounters, good things are waiting to happen all around you. Other experts agree that with a few simple steps, you can significantly increase the chances of meeting your soul mate, finding the right business partner, or steering your life in a new direction. That might sound unlikely or even naive, but there's real science to prove that while you can't control the randomness of life, you can definitely create your own luck.

Why do some people find love at the dry cleaner while others simply move on to the next errand? Why do some travelers make new business contacts on airplanes while others just hunker down to watch the in-flight movie? By definition, a chance encounter is a random event. Our actions, however, play a crucial role in the outcome. When we hear about people who manage to turn chance into opportunity, we think of them as lucky. But that explanation may be too simple.

Richard Wiseman, PhD, has spent more than a decade investigating why some people have more luck than others. A professor at the University of Hertfordshire in England, he holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology. (That's his actual title.) His job is to study the ways in which psychological concepts become known to the general public, but he's also conducted international searches for the funniest joke and best pickup line. A former magician, he has explored the role of chance in our lives and discovered that some people really do have all the luck while others are "magnets for ill fortune."

Luck is usually defined as an unpredictable phenomenon that leads to good or bad outcomes. But after years of experiments, Wiseman disagrees. "Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods," he writes in The Luck Factor, his 2003 book about the essential principles of changing your fortune. "Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving." He insists that we have far more control over the element—and outcome—of chance in our lives than we realize. In fact, he argues that only 10 percent of life is truly random. The remaining 90 percent is "actually defined by the way you think."

To investigate this idea, Wiseman devised an experiment for which he recruited a pair of test subjects, Martin and Brenda (their names have been changed). Martin described himself as lucky; Brenda insisted that she was not. Wiseman asked them to go, at different times, to a coffee shop near his university, ostensibly to meet someone else involved in the research project; in reality, they were going to be exposed to identical "chance" opportunities.

Of course the setup was rigged. First, Wiseman had taped a crisp £5 note to the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. Next, he'd planted actors at each of the four tables inside. One of the plants was a "millionaire"; the others were not. Each was instructed to behave in exactly the same way.

Walking up to the store, Martin immediately spotted the money on the sidewalk and picked it up. He ordered coffee and took a seat next to the millionaire. After introducing himself and offering to buy a round of coffee, Martin found himself engaged in spirited conversation with the man; soon they were exploring the possibility of doing business together.

Brenda, on the other hand, marched right past the money without noticing it. She bought her coffee and sat down next to the millionaire, but they didn't exchange a word.

Later, when asked to describe his day, Martin reported that he'd been very lucky, finding £5 and meeting an interesting businessman. Brenda's report: It was an uneventful morning.

"Same opportunities," Wiseman says. "Different lives."

So why did Martin and Brenda have such different experiences? "Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives," Wiseman notes. If luck means being in the right place at the right time, he adds, "being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

In psychological terms, lucky people tend to be more extroverted, a word whose Latin roots mean "turned outward." Typically, they're gregarious. They have the power to draw others toward them. They're adept at maintaining friendships. And they cultivate what Wiseman describes as a "strong network of luck" that helps promote opportunity in their lives.

Ultimately, Wiseman believes, the bigger your circle of acquaintances, the more opportunities you have. A typical person knows about 300 people on a first-name basis. So if you go to a party and meet someone new, he explains, you're "only two handshakes away from 300 times 300 people; that's 90,000 new possibilities for a new opportunity, just by saying hello." By the same logic, if you meet 50 new people at a conference, you're just a couple of introductions away from 4.5 million opportunities to change your life.

But handshakes aren't the only way to increase the odds of a life-changing encounter. Wiseman claims that 80 percent of the people who try to increase their serendipity are successful. It takes only a month, he says, and most people report their luck increases by an average of 40 percent. A few keys to success:

Prepare your mind. Don't leave chance encounters entirely to chance, says Colleen Seifert. Instead, try doing a little predictive encoding and get your mind ready for good things to happen. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Seifert says, quoting Louis Pasteur. If you lay the groundwork, then when something happens by chance, your memory goes right to work and "you notice it for free."

Give chance a chance. If you always pick apples in the same part of an orchard, Wiseman notes, you'll eventually run out of fruit. The same applies to luck. Pursue an active life—get out there and do things—and you'll increase the likelihood of good things happening. Go apple picking—or grocery shopping, for that matter—somewhere new. Eat your lunch on a different park bench. You never know who will be sitting next to you.

Relax. If you're anxious, stressed, or preoccupied, Wiseman believes, you probably won't notice good things waiting to happen. You'll walk right past money on the ground or miss an opportunity to speak with someone in a coffee shop. A laid-back attitude can lead to all sorts of possibilities, but you have to be ready to go with the flow.

Build your network of luck. Stay connected to the people you know, and try to meet new people. You can become more of a social magnet by paying attention to your body language. It may sound obvious, but make smiling a habit. "Remember that you are surrounded by opportunities," Wiseman writes. "It is just a case of looking in the right places and seeing what is really there."

Colleen Seifert used to think it was "inefficient to invest in people you were never going to see again." Why chat with someone on an airplane—or at the dog park, or at an academic conference—if your paths were never going to recross? But she now believes that "people are opportunities. The gift is in the interaction and the connection with another person, whether it lasts forever or not." And you never know where that gift might lead.

Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/relationships/200902_omag_making_your_own_luck/4

A chance meeting might seem like a fluke, but as Ben Sherwood explains, scientific research backs up the notion that you can influence your own destiny. Step one: Smile.
On a Saturday morning February 1994, Colleen Seifert, PhD, woke up early and ate her usual breakfast: half a bagel, fruit, and coffee. She walked her Russian wolfhound, Bandit, and tidied her apartment. Seifert was an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Michigan, and for six years her life had been entirely focused on a single goal: earning tenure. She was a work machine, putting in seven-day weeks and sleeping fewer than six hours each night. Even when she left the lab, her mind was consumed with academic research. "I couldn't walk into a shopping mall without feeling I should have been at work," she says. Her big indulgence was running errands on Saturday mornings.

On this Saturday morning, however, her life was about to catapult in a new direction. Seifert's first stop was Pittsfield Cleaners, a couple of blocks away from her home. It was a splendid, sunny day, she remembers; the university was on spring break, and the streets of Ann Arbor were quiet. She pulled up to the dry cleaner's drive-through window and handed over a tangle of clothes. The man at the cash register sorted through the items and held up a hot pink blouse.

"Is this a dress?" he asked.

"It's a shirt," Seifert said. "I wouldn't wear a dress that short."

The man had a handsome face, and dimples; he wore his hair in a ponytail. "If you've got it, flaunt it," he said with a smile.

Seifert was 34 years old, and it had been a long time since a man had even noticed her. Her 60-hour workweeks left neither time nor energy for taking care of herself. She was overweight and overstressed. She hadn't been on a date in more than two years. Friends had tried to fix her up, but when it came to flirting, she was "out of practice." And yet when the man asked for her phone number to include on the dry cleaning ticket, she blurted out: "So? Are you going to call me?"

He looked confused but recovered quickly. "Sure," he said. "I'll do that."

Flustered but "flushed with the daring" of what she'd said, Seifert drove off. She figured the man would never call, but it was thrilling to have done something so out of character. And then, around 7 o'clock that evening, the phone rang. It was him. He introduced himself—his name was Zeke Montalvo—and asked Seifert to go to the movies that night. She said yes. They had a good time. It turned out that Montalvo was only 25 and hadn't gone to college, but the two started dating. Then they fell in love. And six years after they met, on a cold Christmas Eve at a house by a lake, Montalvo proposed with an heirloom ring. They were married the next month.

At the most unlikely time, in the least romantic place, Seifert met the man of her dreams. It was a random event that changed her life forever. A classic chance encounter. Or was it?

Seifert's academic specialty is cognitive psychology, the science of why people think the way they do. And to understand what really happened the day she met Montalvo, she says you need to start the day before her trip to the cleaners.

That afternoon, in her office, she had received a bouquet of flowers from the chair of the psychology department. The note read, "Congratulations! Your tenure has been approved." If someone else had been in the room, she might have hugged them, but she was alone, so she simply cried with relief. After six years of single-minded obsession, her work had paid off. To celebrate, she went for a drink with a colleague that night. But even as she sat sipping her margarita, a feeling of anticlimax set in. She wondered if the achievement had been worth the sacrifice.

When Seifert awoke the next morning, everything felt different, as though a weight had been lifted. "I don't have to go to work today," she thought. Drinking coffee in her breakfast nook, she asked herself: "Now what? How do I want my life to go? How do I make something good happen?" She told herself that her future started today, and that there had to be something better. She promised herself that in 10 years, she wasn't going to be alone like this. From now on, she would celebrate important occasions with a crowd of friends, not just one colleague. All of a sudden, she had new goals, and she recognized that she would need to take specific steps to reach them. An introvert by nature, she decided to interact more with people. She would shake their hands, look them in the eye, engage in livelier conversation.

For Seifert, these weren't just idle thoughts. Through her research, she had come up with a concept she called "predictive encoding"—the anticipation of when a particular piece of knowledge is going to be useful—and it described exactly what she was doing as she sat at her kitchen table. Research has shown that most people aren't very good at recalling information—or intentions—when they need to. For instance, you know you're out of toilet paper, you go to the store to pick some up, and somehow you manage to come home without it. Or you know you want to meet someone and fall in love, but when you're out and about interacting with people, you somehow manage to come home without having connected with anyone. Though you know what you want, Seifert says, that knowledge doesn't always come to mind at the right time to guide your behavior. But if, when you're thinking about what you want, you imagine the situations in which you'll need to remember it, you're more likely to succeed. Preparing your mind for a certain behavior increases (by as much as 50 percent) the chance that you'll pull that behavior off. And that's what Seifert was attempting: to prepare—or encode into memory—her plans to change her behavior in a way that might change her future. By imagining a new role as a "people person," she was giving herself a better chance of behaving like one whenever the opportunity arose.

Of course, if anyone had told her she would go on a date that night with a man who worked at the dry cleaner, she would have thought it preposterous. Still, even if she wasn't expecting to meet Mr. Right when she pulled up to the drive-through window, she did know she wanted to engage the world differently. And she believes she met her husband because she had mentally prepared for a chance encounter. By seeding her mind with the vision of more connected and fulfilling relationships, Seifert says, she gave her mind instant access to this information when she ran into someone new. And that, in turn, helped her change her behavior and take action.

Seifert isn't alone in believing that if you prepare yourself to make the most of chance encounters, good things are waiting to happen all around you. Other experts agree that with a few simple steps, you can significantly increase the chances of meeting your soul mate, finding the right business partner, or steering your life in a new direction. That might sound unlikely or even naive, but there's real science to prove that while you can't control the randomness of life, you can definitely create your own luck.

Why do some people find love at the dry cleaner while others simply move on to the next errand? Why do some travelers make new business contacts on airplanes while others just hunker down to watch the in-flight movie? By definition, a chance encounter is a random event. Our actions, however, play a crucial role in the outcome. When we hear about people who manage to turn chance into opportunity, we think of them as lucky. But that explanation may be too simple.

Richard Wiseman, PhD, has spent more than a decade investigating why some people have more luck than others. A professor at the University of Hertfordshire in England, he holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology. (That's his actual title.) His job is to study the ways in which psychological concepts become known to the general public, but he's also conducted international searches for the funniest joke and best pickup line. A former magician, he has explored the role of chance in our lives and discovered that some people really do have all the luck while others are "magnets for ill fortune."

Luck is usually defined as an unpredictable phenomenon that leads to good or bad outcomes. But after years of experiments, Wiseman disagrees. "Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods," he writes in The Luck Factor, his 2003 book about the essential principles of changing your fortune. "Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving." He insists that we have far more control over the element—and outcome—of chance in our lives than we realize. In fact, he argues that only 10 percent of life is truly random. The remaining 90 percent is "actually defined by the way you think."

To investigate this idea, Wiseman devised an experiment for which he recruited a pair of test subjects, Martin and Brenda (their names have been changed). Martin described himself as lucky; Brenda insisted that she was not. Wiseman asked them to go, at different times, to a coffee shop near his university, ostensibly to meet someone else involved in the research project; in reality, they were going to be exposed to identical "chance" opportunities.

Of course the setup was rigged. First, Wiseman had taped a crisp £5 note to the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. Next, he'd planted actors at each of the four tables inside. One of the plants was a "millionaire"; the others were not. Each was instructed to behave in exactly the same way.

Walking up to the store, Martin immediately spotted the money on the sidewalk and picked it up. He ordered coffee and took a seat next to the millionaire. After introducing himself and offering to buy a round of coffee, Martin found himself engaged in spirited conversation with the man; soon they were exploring the possibility of doing business together.

Brenda, on the other hand, marched right past the money without noticing it. She bought her coffee and sat down next to the millionaire, but they didn't exchange a word.

Later, when asked to describe his day, Martin reported that he'd been very lucky, finding £5 and meeting an interesting businessman. Brenda's report: It was an uneventful morning.

"Same opportunities," Wiseman says. "Different lives."

So why did Martin and Brenda have such different experiences? "Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives," Wiseman notes. If luck means being in the right place at the right time, he adds, "being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

In psychological terms, lucky people tend to be more extroverted, a word whose Latin roots mean "turned outward." Typically, they're gregarious. They have the power to draw others toward them. They're adept at maintaining friendships. And they cultivate what Wiseman describes as a "strong network of luck" that helps promote opportunity in their lives.

Ultimately, Wiseman believes, the bigger your circle of acquaintances, the more opportunities you have. A typical person knows about 300 people on a first-name basis. So if you go to a party and meet someone new, he explains, you're "only two handshakes away from 300 times 300 people; that's 90,000 new possibilities for a new opportunity, just by saying hello." By the same logic, if you meet 50 new people at a conference, you're just a couple of introductions away from 4.5 million opportunities to change your life.

But handshakes aren't the only way to increase the odds of a life-changing encounter. Wiseman claims that 80 percent of the people who try to increase their serendipity are successful. It takes only a month, he says, and most people report their luck increases by an average of 40 percent. A few keys to success:

Prepare your mind. Don't leave chance encounters entirely to chance, says Colleen Seifert. Instead, try doing a little predictive encoding and get your mind ready for good things to happen. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Seifert says, quoting Louis Pasteur. If you lay the groundwork, then when something happens by chance, your memory goes right to work and "you notice it for free."

Give chance a chance. If you always pick apples in the same part of an orchard, Wiseman notes, you'll eventually run out of fruit. The same applies to luck. Pursue an active life—get out there and do things—and you'll increase the likelihood of good things happening. Go apple picking—or grocery shopping, for that matter—somewhere new. Eat your lunch on a different park bench. You never know who will be sitting next to you.

Relax. If you're anxious, stressed, or preoccupied, Wiseman believes, you probably won't notice good things waiting to happen. You'll walk right past money on the ground or miss an opportunity to speak with someone in a coffee shop. A laid-back attitude can lead to all sorts of possibilities, but you have to be ready to go with the flow.

Build your network of luck. Stay connected to the people you know, and try to meet new people. You can become more of a social magnet by paying attention to your body language. It may sound obvious, but make smiling a habit. "Remember that you are surrounded by opportunities," Wiseman writes. "It is just a case of looking in the right places and seeing what is really there."

Colleen Seifert used to think it was "inefficient to invest in people you were never going to see again." Why chat with someone on an airplane—or at the dog park, or at an academic conference—if your paths were never going to recross? But she now believes that "people are opportunities. The gift is in the interaction and the connection with another person, whether it lasts forever or not." And you never know where that gift might lead.

Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/relationships/200902_omag_making_your_own_luck/4

A chance meeting might seem like a fluke, but as Ben Sherwood explains, scientific research backs up the notion that you can influence your own destiny. Step one: Smile.
On a Saturday morning February 1994, Colleen Seifert, PhD, woke up early and ate her usual breakfast: half a bagel, fruit, and coffee. She walked her Russian wolfhound, Bandit, and tidied her apartment. Seifert was an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Michigan, and for six years her life had been entirely focused on a single goal: earning tenure. She was a work machine, putting in seven-day weeks and sleeping fewer than six hours each night. Even when she left the lab, her mind was consumed with academic research. "I couldn't walk into a shopping mall without feeling I should have been at work," she says. Her big indulgence was running errands on Saturday mornings.

On this Saturday morning, however, her life was about to catapult in a new direction. Seifert's first stop was Pittsfield Cleaners, a couple of blocks away from her home. It was a splendid, sunny day, she remembers; the university was on spring break, and the streets of Ann Arbor were quiet. She pulled up to the dry cleaner's drive-through window and handed over a tangle of clothes. The man at the cash register sorted through the items and held up a hot pink blouse.

"Is this a dress?" he asked.

"It's a shirt," Seifert said. "I wouldn't wear a dress that short."

The man had a handsome face, and dimples; he wore his hair in a ponytail. "If you've got it, flaunt it," he said with a smile.

Seifert was 34 years old, and it had been a long time since a man had even noticed her. Her 60-hour workweeks left neither time nor energy for taking care of herself. She was overweight and overstressed. She hadn't been on a date in more than two years. Friends had tried to fix her up, but when it came to flirting, she was "out of practice." And yet when the man asked for her phone number to include on the dry cleaning ticket, she blurted out: "So? Are you going to call me?"

He looked confused but recovered quickly. "Sure," he said. "I'll do that."

Flustered but "flushed with the daring" of what she'd said, Seifert drove off. She figured the man would never call, but it was thrilling to have done something so out of character. And then, around 7 o'clock that evening, the phone rang. It was him. He introduced himself—his name was Zeke Montalvo—and asked Seifert to go to the movies that night. She said yes. They had a good time. It turned out that Montalvo was only 25 and hadn't gone to college, but the two started dating. Then they fell in love. And six years after they met, on a cold Christmas Eve at a house by a lake, Montalvo proposed with an heirloom ring. They were married the next month.

At the most unlikely time, in the least romantic place, Seifert met the man of her dreams. It was a random event that changed her life forever. A classic chance encounter. Or was it?

Seifert's academic specialty is cognitive psychology, the science of why people think the way they do. And to understand what really happened the day she met Montalvo, she says you need to start the day before her trip to the cleaners.

That afternoon, in her office, she had received a bouquet of flowers from the chair of the psychology department. The note read, "Congratulations! Your tenure has been approved." If someone else had been in the room, she might have hugged them, but she was alone, so she simply cried with relief. After six years of single-minded obsession, her work had paid off. To celebrate, she went for a drink with a colleague that night. But even as she sat sipping her margarita, a feeling of anticlimax set in. She wondered if the achievement had been worth the sacrifice.

When Seifert awoke the next morning, everything felt different, as though a weight had been lifted. "I don't have to go to work today," she thought. Drinking coffee in her breakfast nook, she asked herself: "Now what? How do I want my life to go? How do I make something good happen?" She told herself that her future started today, and that there had to be something better. She promised herself that in 10 years, she wasn't going to be alone like this. From now on, she would celebrate important occasions with a crowd of friends, not just one colleague. All of a sudden, she had new goals, and she recognized that she would need to take specific steps to reach them. An introvert by nature, she decided to interact more with people. She would shake their hands, look them in the eye, engage in livelier conversation.

For Seifert, these weren't just idle thoughts. Through her research, she had come up with a concept she called "predictive encoding"—the anticipation of when a particular piece of knowledge is going to be useful—and it described exactly what she was doing as she sat at her kitchen table. Research has shown that most people aren't very good at recalling information—or intentions—when they need to. For instance, you know you're out of toilet paper, you go to the store to pick some up, and somehow you manage to come home without it. Or you know you want to meet someone and fall in love, but when you're out and about interacting with people, you somehow manage to come home without having connected with anyone. Though you know what you want, Seifert says, that knowledge doesn't always come to mind at the right time to guide your behavior. But if, when you're thinking about what you want, you imagine the situations in which you'll need to remember it, you're more likely to succeed. Preparing your mind for a certain behavior increases (by as much as 50 percent) the chance that you'll pull that behavior off. And that's what Seifert was attempting: to prepare—or encode into memory—her plans to change her behavior in a way that might change her future. By imagining a new role as a "people person," she was giving herself a better chance of behaving like one whenever the opportunity arose.

Of course, if anyone had told her she would go on a date that night with a man who worked at the dry cleaner, she would have thought it preposterous. Still, even if she wasn't expecting to meet Mr. Right when she pulled up to the drive-through window, she did know she wanted to engage the world differently. And she believes she met her husband because she had mentally prepared for a chance encounter. By seeding her mind with the vision of more connected and fulfilling relationships, Seifert says, she gave her mind instant access to this information when she ran into someone new. And that, in turn, helped her change her behavior and take action.

Seifert isn't alone in believing that if you prepare yourself to make the most of chance encounters, good things are waiting to happen all around you. Other experts agree that with a few simple steps, you can significantly increase the chances of meeting your soul mate, finding the right business partner, or steering your life in a new direction. That might sound unlikely or even naive, but there's real science to prove that while you can't control the randomness of life, you can definitely create your own luck.

Why do some people find love at the dry cleaner while others simply move on to the next errand? Why do some travelers make new business contacts on airplanes while others just hunker down to watch the in-flight movie? By definition, a chance encounter is a random event. Our actions, however, play a crucial role in the outcome. When we hear about people who manage to turn chance into opportunity, we think of them as lucky. But that explanation may be too simple.

Richard Wiseman, PhD, has spent more than a decade investigating why some people have more luck than others. A professor at the University of Hertfordshire in England, he holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology. (That's his actual title.) His job is to study the ways in which psychological concepts become known to the general public, but he's also conducted international searches for the funniest joke and best pickup line. A former magician, he has explored the role of chance in our lives and discovered that some people really do have all the luck while others are "magnets for ill fortune."

Luck is usually defined as an unpredictable phenomenon that leads to good or bad outcomes. But after years of experiments, Wiseman disagrees. "Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods," he writes in The Luck Factor, his 2003 book about the essential principles of changing your fortune. "Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving." He insists that we have far more control over the element—and outcome—of chance in our lives than we realize. In fact, he argues that only 10 percent of life is truly random. The remaining 90 percent is "actually defined by the way you think."

To investigate this idea, Wiseman devised an experiment for which he recruited a pair of test subjects, Martin and Brenda (their names have been changed). Martin described himself as lucky; Brenda insisted that she was not. Wiseman asked them to go, at different times, to a coffee shop near his university, ostensibly to meet someone else involved in the research project; in reality, they were going to be exposed to identical "chance" opportunities.

Of course the setup was rigged. First, Wiseman had taped a crisp £5 note to the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. Next, he'd planted actors at each of the four tables inside. One of the plants was a "millionaire"; the others were not. Each was instructed to behave in exactly the same way.

Walking up to the store, Martin immediately spotted the money on the sidewalk and picked it up. He ordered coffee and took a seat next to the millionaire. After introducing himself and offering to buy a round of coffee, Martin found himself engaged in spirited conversation with the man; soon they were exploring the possibility of doing business together.

Brenda, on the other hand, marched right past the money without noticing it. She bought her coffee and sat down next to the millionaire, but they didn't exchange a word.

Later, when asked to describe his day, Martin reported that he'd been very lucky, finding £5 and meeting an interesting businessman. Brenda's report: It was an uneventful morning.

"Same opportunities," Wiseman says. "Different lives."

So why did Martin and Brenda have such different experiences? "Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives," Wiseman notes. If luck means being in the right place at the right time, he adds, "being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

In psychological terms, lucky people tend to be more extroverted, a word whose Latin roots mean "turned outward." Typically, they're gregarious. They have the power to draw others toward them. They're adept at maintaining friendships. And they cultivate what Wiseman describes as a "strong network of luck" that helps promote opportunity in their lives.

Ultimately, Wiseman believes, the bigger your circle of acquaintances, the more opportunities you have. A typical person knows about 300 people on a first-name basis. So if you go to a party and meet someone new, he explains, you're "only two handshakes away from 300 times 300 people; that's 90,000 new possibilities for a new opportunity, just by saying hello." By the same logic, if you meet 50 new people at a conference, you're just a couple of introductions away from 4.5 million opportunities to change your life.

But handshakes aren't the only way to increase the odds of a life-changing encounter. Wiseman claims that 80 percent of the people who try to increase their serendipity are successful. It takes only a month, he says, and most people report their luck increases by an average of 40 percent. A few keys to success:

Prepare your mind. Don't leave chance encounters entirely to chance, says Colleen Seifert. Instead, try doing a little predictive encoding and get your mind ready for good things to happen. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Seifert says, quoting Louis Pasteur. If you lay the groundwork, then when something happens by chance, your memory goes right to work and "you notice it for free."

Give chance a chance. If you always pick apples in the same part of an orchard, Wiseman notes, you'll eventually run out of fruit. The same applies to luck. Pursue an active life—get out there and do things—and you'll increase the likelihood of good things happening. Go apple picking—or grocery shopping, for that matter—somewhere new. Eat your lunch on a different park bench. You never know who will be sitting next to you.

Relax. If you're anxious, stressed, or preoccupied, Wiseman believes, you probably won't notice good things waiting to happen. You'll walk right past money on the ground or miss an opportunity to speak with someone in a coffee shop. A laid-back attitude can lead to all sorts of possibilities, but you have to be ready to go with the flow.

Build your network of luck. Stay connected to the people you know, and try to meet new people. You can become more of a social magnet by paying attention to your body language. It may sound obvious, but make smiling a habit. "Remember that you are surrounded by opportunities," Wiseman writes. "It is just a case of looking in the right places and seeing what is really there."

Colleen Seifert used to think it was "inefficient to invest in people you were never going to see again." Why chat with someone on an airplane—or at the dog park, or at an academic conference—if your paths were never going to recross? But she now believes that "people are opportunities. The gift is in the interaction and the connection with another person, whether it lasts forever or not." And you never know where that gift might lead.

Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/relationships/200902_omag_making_your_own_luck/4

A chance meeting might seem like a fluke, but as Ben Sherwood explains, scientific research backs up the notion that you can influence your own destiny. Step one: Smile.
On a Saturday morning February 1994, Colleen Seifert, PhD, woke up early and ate her usual breakfast: half a bagel, fruit, and coffee. She walked her Russian wolfhound, Bandit, and tidied her apartment. Seifert was an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Michigan, and for six years her life had been entirely focused on a single goal: earning tenure. She was a work machine, putting in seven-day weeks and sleeping fewer than six hours each night. Even when she left the lab, her mind was consumed with academic research. "I couldn't walk into a shopping mall without feeling I should have been at work," she says. Her big indulgence was running errands on Saturday mornings.

On this Saturday morning, however, her life was about to catapult in a new direction. Seifert's first stop was Pittsfield Cleaners, a couple of blocks away from her home. It was a splendid, sunny day, she remembers; the university was on spring break, and the streets of Ann Arbor were quiet. She pulled up to the dry cleaner's drive-through window and handed over a tangle of clothes. The man at the cash register sorted through the items and held up a hot pink blouse.

"Is this a dress?" he asked.

"It's a shirt," Seifert said. "I wouldn't wear a dress that short."

The man had a handsome face, and dimples; he wore his hair in a ponytail. "If you've got it, flaunt it," he said with a smile.

Seifert was 34 years old, and it had been a long time since a man had even noticed her. Her 60-hour workweeks left neither time nor energy for taking care of herself. She was overweight and overstressed. She hadn't been on a date in more than two years. Friends had tried to fix her up, but when it came to flirting, she was "out of practice." And yet when the man asked for her phone number to include on the dry cleaning ticket, she blurted out: "So? Are you going to call me?"

He looked confused but recovered quickly. "Sure," he said. "I'll do that."

Flustered but "flushed with the daring" of what she'd said, Seifert drove off. She figured the man would never call, but it was thrilling to have done something so out of character. And then, around 7 o'clock that evening, the phone rang. It was him. He introduced himself—his name was Zeke Montalvo—and asked Seifert to go to the movies that night. She said yes. They had a good time. It turned out that Montalvo was only 25 and hadn't gone to college, but the two started dating. Then they fell in love. And six years after they met, on a cold Christmas Eve at a house by a lake, Montalvo proposed with an heirloom ring. They were married the next month.

At the most unlikely time, in the least romantic place, Seifert met the man of her dreams. It was a random event that changed her life forever. A classic chance encounter. Or was it?

Seifert's academic specialty is cognitive psychology, the science of why people think the way they do. And to understand what really happened the day she met Montalvo, she says you need to start the day before her trip to the cleaners.

That afternoon, in her office, she had received a bouquet of flowers from the chair of the psychology department. The note read, "Congratulations! Your tenure has been approved." If someone else had been in the room, she might have hugged them, but she was alone, so she simply cried with relief. After six years of single-minded obsession, her work had paid off. To celebrate, she went for a drink with a colleague that night. But even as she sat sipping her margarita, a feeling of anticlimax set in. She wondered if the achievement had been worth the sacrifice.

When Seifert awoke the next morning, everything felt different, as though a weight had been lifted. "I don't have to go to work today," she thought. Drinking coffee in her breakfast nook, she asked herself: "Now what? How do I want my life to go? How do I make something good happen?" She told herself that her future started today, and that there had to be something better. She promised herself that in 10 years, she wasn't going to be alone like this. From now on, she would celebrate important occasions with a crowd of friends, not just one colleague. All of a sudden, she had new goals, and she recognized that she would need to take specific steps to reach them. An introvert by nature, she decided to interact more with people. She would shake their hands, look them in the eye, engage in livelier conversation.

For Seifert, these weren't just idle thoughts. Through her research, she had come up with a concept she called "predictive encoding"—the anticipation of when a particular piece of knowledge is going to be useful—and it described exactly what she was doing as she sat at her kitchen table. Research has shown that most people aren't very good at recalling information—or intentions—when they need to. For instance, you know you're out of toilet paper, you go to the store to pick some up, and somehow you manage to come home without it. Or you know you want to meet someone and fall in love, but when you're out and about interacting with people, you somehow manage to come home without having connected with anyone. Though you know what you want, Seifert says, that knowledge doesn't always come to mind at the right time to guide your behavior. But if, when you're thinking about what you want, you imagine the situations in which you'll need to remember it, you're more likely to succeed. Preparing your mind for a certain behavior increases (by as much as 50 percent) the chance that you'll pull that behavior off. And that's what Seifert was attempting: to prepare—or encode into memory—her plans to change her behavior in a way that might change her future. By imagining a new role as a "people person," she was giving herself a better chance of behaving like one whenever the opportunity arose.

Of course, if anyone had told her she would go on a date that night with a man who worked at the dry cleaner, she would have thought it preposterous. Still, even if she wasn't expecting to meet Mr. Right when she pulled up to the drive-through window, she did know she wanted to engage the world differently. And she believes she met her husband because she had mentally prepared for a chance encounter. By seeding her mind with the vision of more connected and fulfilling relationships, Seifert says, she gave her mind instant access to this information when she ran into someone new. And that, in turn, helped her change her behavior and take action.

Seifert isn't alone in believing that if you prepare yourself to make the most of chance encounters, good things are waiting to happen all around you. Other experts agree that with a few simple steps, you can significantly increase the chances of meeting your soul mate, finding the right business partner, or steering your life in a new direction. That might sound unlikely or even naive, but there's real science to prove that while you can't control the randomness of life, you can definitely create your own luck.

Why do some people find love at the dry cleaner while others simply move on to the next errand? Why do some travelers make new business contacts on airplanes while others just hunker down to watch the in-flight movie? By definition, a chance encounter is a random event. Our actions, however, play a crucial role in the outcome. When we hear about people who manage to turn chance into opportunity, we think of them as lucky. But that explanation may be too simple.

Richard Wiseman, PhD, has spent more than a decade investigating why some people have more luck than others. A professor at the University of Hertfordshire in England, he holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology. (That's his actual title.) His job is to study the ways in which psychological concepts become known to the general public, but he's also conducted international searches for the funniest joke and best pickup line. A former magician, he has explored the role of chance in our lives and discovered that some people really do have all the luck while others are "magnets for ill fortune."

Luck is usually defined as an unpredictable phenomenon that leads to good or bad outcomes. But after years of experiments, Wiseman disagrees. "Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods," he writes in The Luck Factor, his 2003 book about the essential principles of changing your fortune. "Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving." He insists that we have far more control over the element—and outcome—of chance in our lives than we realize. In fact, he argues that only 10 percent of life is truly random. The remaining 90 percent is "actually defined by the way you think."

To investigate this idea, Wiseman devised an experiment for which he recruited a pair of test subjects, Martin and Brenda (their names have been changed). Martin described himself as lucky; Brenda insisted that she was not. Wiseman asked them to go, at different times, to a coffee shop near his university, ostensibly to meet someone else involved in the research project; in reality, they were going to be exposed to identical "chance" opportunities.

Of course the setup was rigged. First, Wiseman had taped a crisp £5 note to the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. Next, he'd planted actors at each of the four tables inside. One of the plants was a "millionaire"; the others were not. Each was instructed to behave in exactly the same way.

Walking up to the store, Martin immediately spotted the money on the sidewalk and picked it up. He ordered coffee and took a seat next to the millionaire. After introducing himself and offering to buy a round of coffee, Martin found himself engaged in spirited conversation with the man; soon they were exploring the possibility of doing business together.

Brenda, on the other hand, marched right past the money without noticing it. She bought her coffee and sat down next to the millionaire, but they didn't exchange a word.

Later, when asked to describe his day, Martin reported that he'd been very lucky, finding £5 and meeting an interesting businessman. Brenda's report: It was an uneventful morning.

"Same opportunities," Wiseman says. "Different lives."

So why did Martin and Brenda have such different experiences? "Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives," Wiseman notes. If luck means being in the right place at the right time, he adds, "being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

In psychological terms, lucky people tend to be more extroverted, a word whose Latin roots mean "turned outward." Typically, they're gregarious. They have the power to draw others toward them. They're adept at maintaining friendships. And they cultivate what Wiseman describes as a "strong network of luck" that helps promote opportunity in their lives.

Ultimately, Wiseman believes, the bigger your circle of acquaintances, the more opportunities you have. A typical person knows about 300 people on a first-name basis. So if you go to a party and meet someone new, he explains, you're "only two handshakes away from 300 times 300 people; that's 90,000 new possibilities for a new opportunity, just by saying hello." By the same logic, if you meet 50 new people at a conference, you're just a couple of introductions away from 4.5 million opportunities to change your life.

But handshakes aren't the only way to increase the odds of a life-changing encounter. Wiseman claims that 80 percent of the people who try to increase their serendipity are successful. It takes only a month, he says, and most people report their luck increases by an average of 40 percent. A few keys to success:

Prepare your mind. Don't leave chance encounters entirely to chance, says Colleen Seifert. Instead, try doing a little predictive encoding and get your mind ready for good things to happen. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Seifert says, quoting Louis Pasteur. If you lay the groundwork, then when something happens by chance, your memory goes right to work and "you notice it for free."

Give chance a chance. If you always pick apples in the same part of an orchard, Wiseman notes, you'll eventually run out of fruit. The same applies to luck. Pursue an active life—get out there and do things—and you'll increase the likelihood of good things happening. Go apple picking—or grocery shopping, for that matter—somewhere new. Eat your lunch on a different park bench. You never know who will be sitting next to you.

Relax. If you're anxious, stressed, or preoccupied, Wiseman believes, you probably won't notice good things waiting to happen. You'll walk right past money on the ground or miss an opportunity to speak with someone in a coffee shop. A laid-back attitude can lead to all sorts of possibilities, but you have to be ready to go with the flow.

Build your network of luck. Stay connected to the people you know, and try to meet new people. You can become more of a social magnet by paying attention to your body language. It may sound obvious, but make smiling a habit. "Remember that you are surrounded by opportunities," Wiseman writes. "It is just a case of looking in the right places and seeing what is really there."

Colleen Seifert used to think it was "inefficient to invest in people you were never going to see again." Why chat with someone on an airplane—or at the dog park, or at an academic conference—if your paths were never going to recross? But she now believes that "people are opportunities. The gift is in the interaction and the connection with another person, whether it lasts forever or not." And you never know where that gift might lead.

Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/relationships/200902_omag_making_your_own_luck/4

Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday? The history of Valentine's Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first 'valentine' greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor's daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine's Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.

According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)

Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine's Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap".

Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday? The history of Valentine's Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first 'valentine' greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor's daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine's Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.

According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)

Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine's Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap".

Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday? The history of Valentine's Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first 'valentine' greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor's daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine's Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.

According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)

Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine's Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap".

Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday? The history of Valentine's Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first 'valentine' greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor's daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine's Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.

According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)

Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine's Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap".

Last summer, when I lived in the country, an ad for a local dating service would come on the radio every time I drove around. "But I'm as pretty and interesting and nice as my friends. Why am I single?" a petulant voice would say. Then an announcer would cut in and tell her to go to speed-shuffle date night; her friends would soon be choking with envy, he'd imply, and each time I'd think, Yeah, right. Okay, she existed in drive-time and was doomed to lament her situation every 15 minutes, but that wasn't what made me doubt that she was heading toward paired happiness. It was the question. She was asking the wrong one.

If you've been without a partner for a while and aren't happy about it, it's natural to wonder why. But put that question to yourself, and the result is you find yourself confronted with obstacles—some considerable. You're single because you moved to New York, where the odds are tipped in favor of men, and not to Alaska, where they aren't. Or because you take jobs that keep you at the office till the dead hours, or because you keep falling for married men, or because your husband died, or because you're over a certain age, which, beginning at about 25, is generally ten years less than what you are right this minute. Then what do you do? You consider cashing in your career and moving to Anchorage, or signing up to be a mail-order bride to China—and then you weep.



Don't Fixate on the Question
I'm not saying that any of these obstacles are permanent or insurmountable. We all know stories of people who found flaming happiness exactly when everyone was convinced they wouldn't. I recently heard—true story, I swear—of a woman in her 60s who was widowed unexpectedly and two years later married a Canadian mountie.

But what's the point of finding happiness after years when you can find it right now? "Yeah, right," you say. How? Easy. And hard: You change that question.

Consider, for starters, what happens when you ask yourself, Why am I still single? You immediately lump yourself in with a designated sorry category that, I'm going to argue right here, doesn't truly exist. Let me explain. In all those social science studies of singles versus marrieds, everyone knows that the singles group is considered the unfortunates. That's why it's always news when they find—who would believe it?—that the single women have managed to eke out some happiness in their otherwise bleak lives. And yet, in actual terms, there's no such thing as single as a bloc. It's not a solid category like Armenian. It's not a fixed characteristic like shoe size. If anything, it's a false social construct. Nowadays we're all single at some points in our lives, involved at others, which is why it gets you a whole lot farther to ask yourself, How can I make the most of whatever stage I'm in? And then set about to figure out the answer.



Embrace Your Current Stage and Banish "Out There" from Your Vocabulary

Now here comes the hard part. To find answers, you have to truly embrace this stage you're in now. Do that and, paradoxically, you're more likely to end up with a boyfriend—for reasons I'll explain—but you can't be doing it to get a boyfriend. You have to relish where you are right now, without a view to side returns—something of a Zen conundrum. How are you going to "be here now" when you're bombarded with all the single-woman messages? "You'd better hurry up and find someone." "Time's running out." "There are no men out there." "Watch out, he's about to cheat on you." (Oh, wait, that's the one the married women get.)

To begin with, you're going to banish the words "out there" from your vocabulary and mind. For all the discussion we give to it, it's easy to forget that it's not a real place. Out there has a lot in common with Narnia, in fact: It's fraught with peril, and it's invisible. I've been at tables of women where we've spooked ourselves all night with discussions of out there ("Once you reach a certain age, you begin to try to make it work with anyone, because you realize there are no men out there"), then we've turned to the single among us and advised, "You know, you just have to get yourself out there." (All conversation guaranteed verbatim.)

Start to pay attention to your thoughts when you're freaking, and you'll begin to see how often you're getting flummoxed by unnecessary fear. The question, Why am I single? sends you in one direction and one direction alone: toward a zone of fear. The implication is, you're failing. You're in the void. That kind of thought is a trap. "Has anything good and strong ever come out of fear?" my friend Sarah asks. "It's a bad motivator. It always drives you into things that are wrong." For instance, and above all, the next bad relationship. Leap into another just to shore yourself up from the last, and a nasty cycle sets up. Because you're in the new relationship for shaky reasons—to salve the pain from the first—the second's pretty much guaranteed to fall apart. At which point, if you don't step back, you'll end up scrambling for a third that's destined to self-destruct.


Meditation Activities Are a Good Start

If, at that same panic point, you say to yourself, All right, this is just where I am. How do I get the most out of this part? You're putting yourself in a very different place, a zone of possibilities and expansiveness.

There are things you can do to help yourself enter that zone. A meditation practice is one of them. "One thing meditation's shown me," says Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience and cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, "is that experience is one thing and our interpretation of it is another. The interpretation seems so solid and comes so quickly, we don't realize that there's space in there and that we have a choice of responses: compassion versus impatience, positive versus negative." To illustrate the difference between experience and interpretation, she laughingly gives the following example: "The other night, I was walking in the rain toward the class I teach, when I saw this guy coming toward me on a bicycle. My first thought was, Oh, this poor guy, out in the rain on a bike. Then he splashed me. My next thought was, Oh, how ridiculous to be out in the rain on a bike."

When you can separate incident from interpretation, she continues, you see more clearly, with more heart. "You learn to dare to say, What happens if I try viewing this event from this angle instead?" she says. "It becomes like an adventure. You say, Wow, I spent all those years catering to the needs of this other person. Look at this: I'm going to be myself. Or I'm going to write my book. Or I'm going to reach out to these other people." If you think happiness can lie in only one thing, she concludes, you miss all the available happiness.


You'll Be More Attractive with a Full Life

When you're in that zone of expansiveness, you become more generous with others and yourself. You give yourself time to figure out what you want. "The longer you're not with someone just to be with someone, the more you get a better sense of what's negotiable for you and what's not," says my friend Sarah, who, through allowing herself a breather, came to understand, "I can't hook up again with someone who doesn't love dogs. Or who wouldn't think of doing some sort of charity work, since that bespeaks a kind of stinginess at a spiritual level. Someone who has a lot of money—I don't care about that. On my own, I've learned these things about myself."

Generosity is a higher form of power, one that no one can give you but that you can freely take. Another friend did just that when she decided to stop telling herself, I want to find someone to love me, and tried saying, I want to find someone to love. Not long after, she did.

When you expand yourself, you expand your world. And that's why you do it, why you shift into a generous realm, not to get a boyfriend, though there's a good chance that will be one result. (You're a lot more attractive with a wide, full life than when you're judging each man by what he can give you.) You do it for the broader vision, for the expansion itself, which will build on itself till your life will have levels and depths you never thought possible. You do it in order to be fully present at each moment of your life. When you are, anything can happen. When you're shut down by fear, not much will. And you do it because when you're in that larger place, you get to see, once and for all, there's really nothing out there.




By Katherine Russell Rich


Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/omag_200502_alone

Last summer, when I lived in the country, an ad for a local dating service would come on the radio every time I drove around. "But I'm as pretty and interesting and nice as my friends. Why am I single?" a petulant voice would say. Then an announcer would cut in and tell her to go to speed-shuffle date night; her friends would soon be choking with envy, he'd imply, and each time I'd think, Yeah, right. Okay, she existed in drive-time and was doomed to lament her situation every 15 minutes, but that wasn't what made me doubt that she was heading toward paired happiness. It was the question. She was asking the wrong one.

If you've been without a partner for a while and aren't happy about it, it's natural to wonder why. But put that question to yourself, and the result is you find yourself confronted with obstacles—some considerable. You're single because you moved to New York, where the odds are tipped in favor of men, and not to Alaska, where they aren't. Or because you take jobs that keep you at the office till the dead hours, or because you keep falling for married men, or because your husband died, or because you're over a certain age, which, beginning at about 25, is generally ten years less than what you are right this minute. Then what do you do? You consider cashing in your career and moving to Anchorage, or signing up to be a mail-order bride to China—and then you weep.



Don't Fixate on the Question
I'm not saying that any of these obstacles are permanent or insurmountable. We all know stories of people who found flaming happiness exactly when everyone was convinced they wouldn't. I recently heard—true story, I swear—of a woman in her 60s who was widowed unexpectedly and two years later married a Canadian mountie.

But what's the point of finding happiness after years when you can find it right now? "Yeah, right," you say. How? Easy. And hard: You change that question.

Consider, for starters, what happens when you ask yourself, Why am I still single? You immediately lump yourself in with a designated sorry category that, I'm going to argue right here, doesn't truly exist. Let me explain. In all those social science studies of singles versus marrieds, everyone knows that the singles group is considered the unfortunates. That's why it's always news when they find—who would believe it?—that the single women have managed to eke out some happiness in their otherwise bleak lives. And yet, in actual terms, there's no such thing as single as a bloc. It's not a solid category like Armenian. It's not a fixed characteristic like shoe size. If anything, it's a false social construct. Nowadays we're all single at some points in our lives, involved at others, which is why it gets you a whole lot farther to ask yourself, How can I make the most of whatever stage I'm in? And then set about to figure out the answer.



Embrace Your Current Stage and Banish "Out There" from Your Vocabulary

Now here comes the hard part. To find answers, you have to truly embrace this stage you're in now. Do that and, paradoxically, you're more likely to end up with a boyfriend—for reasons I'll explain—but you can't be doing it to get a boyfriend. You have to relish where you are right now, without a view to side returns—something of a Zen conundrum. How are you going to "be here now" when you're bombarded with all the single-woman messages? "You'd better hurry up and find someone." "Time's running out." "There are no men out there." "Watch out, he's about to cheat on you." (Oh, wait, that's the one the married women get.)

To begin with, you're going to banish the words "out there" from your vocabulary and mind. For all the discussion we give to it, it's easy to forget that it's not a real place. Out there has a lot in common with Narnia, in fact: It's fraught with peril, and it's invisible. I've been at tables of women where we've spooked ourselves all night with discussions of out there ("Once you reach a certain age, you begin to try to make it work with anyone, because you realize there are no men out there"), then we've turned to the single among us and advised, "You know, you just have to get yourself out there." (All conversation guaranteed verbatim.)

Start to pay attention to your thoughts when you're freaking, and you'll begin to see how often you're getting flummoxed by unnecessary fear. The question, Why am I single? sends you in one direction and one direction alone: toward a zone of fear. The implication is, you're failing. You're in the void. That kind of thought is a trap. "Has anything good and strong ever come out of fear?" my friend Sarah asks. "It's a bad motivator. It always drives you into things that are wrong." For instance, and above all, the next bad relationship. Leap into another just to shore yourself up from the last, and a nasty cycle sets up. Because you're in the new relationship for shaky reasons—to salve the pain from the first—the second's pretty much guaranteed to fall apart. At which point, if you don't step back, you'll end up scrambling for a third that's destined to self-destruct.


Meditation Activities Are a Good Start

If, at that same panic point, you say to yourself, All right, this is just where I am. How do I get the most out of this part? You're putting yourself in a very different place, a zone of possibilities and expansiveness.

There are things you can do to help yourself enter that zone. A meditation practice is one of them. "One thing meditation's shown me," says Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience and cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, "is that experience is one thing and our interpretation of it is another. The interpretation seems so solid and comes so quickly, we don't realize that there's space in there and that we have a choice of responses: compassion versus impatience, positive versus negative." To illustrate the difference between experience and interpretation, she laughingly gives the following example: "The other night, I was walking in the rain toward the class I teach, when I saw this guy coming toward me on a bicycle. My first thought was, Oh, this poor guy, out in the rain on a bike. Then he splashed me. My next thought was, Oh, how ridiculous to be out in the rain on a bike."

When you can separate incident from interpretation, she continues, you see more clearly, with more heart. "You learn to dare to say, What happens if I try viewing this event from this angle instead?" she says. "It becomes like an adventure. You say, Wow, I spent all those years catering to the needs of this other person. Look at this: I'm going to be myself. Or I'm going to write my book. Or I'm going to reach out to these other people." If you think happiness can lie in only one thing, she concludes, you miss all the available happiness.


You'll Be More Attractive with a Full Life

When you're in that zone of expansiveness, you become more generous with others and yourself. You give yourself time to figure out what you want. "The longer you're not with someone just to be with someone, the more you get a better sense of what's negotiable for you and what's not," says my friend Sarah, who, through allowing herself a breather, came to understand, "I can't hook up again with someone who doesn't love dogs. Or who wouldn't think of doing some sort of charity work, since that bespeaks a kind of stinginess at a spiritual level. Someone who has a lot of money—I don't care about that. On my own, I've learned these things about myself."

Generosity is a higher form of power, one that no one can give you but that you can freely take. Another friend did just that when she decided to stop telling herself, I want to find someone to love me, and tried saying, I want to find someone to love. Not long after, she did.

When you expand yourself, you expand your world. And that's why you do it, why you shift into a generous realm, not to get a boyfriend, though there's a good chance that will be one result. (You're a lot more attractive with a wide, full life than when you're judging each man by what he can give you.) You do it for the broader vision, for the expansion itself, which will build on itself till your life will have levels and depths you never thought possible. You do it in order to be fully present at each moment of your life. When you are, anything can happen. When you're shut down by fear, not much will. And you do it because when you're in that larger place, you get to see, once and for all, there's really nothing out there.




By Katherine Russell Rich


Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/omag_200502_alone