Nostalgia is also a trait of the organizations that I call lodges - everything from corporate cultures to religious sects. Their bonding power often exceeds loyalty to family or country because they create intimacy through shared ideals and beliefs, ceremonies, stories, and legends, and depend on it for their survival. The message is clear: Don't question what we're doing. Just appreciate how long we've been doing it.

What choices are you making in your perception of the events around you? We choose how we view our times. There is a pinch of pessimism in our culture now. Counter it with small acts of optimism. Pick up a piece of litter that isn't yours. Show some extra grace on the freeway. Give to your food bank. Smile at a child who is in your way. Help someone you know. Help someone you don't know. The accumulation of small, optimistic acts produces quality in our culture and in your life. Our culture resonates in tense times to individual acts of grace. What's your choice?

People are beginning to realize that self-knowledge is not an end in itself. It's for the purpose of better relationships, so that we can give to our community. You can give from overflow. It's very hard to give from emptiness. . . . People who avoid self-knowledge cause a great deal of pain to themselves as well as to their families and friends.

There is no way to live up to your full potential in life without losing lots of things. Yet there are people who believe you can go through a lifetime without losing anything, if you would just be more careful and more thoughtful. They actually believe that a child can get through elementary school without losing a jacket, but that's impossible unless the child is very repressed.

Anger is a response that can lead to harm if we don't evaluate what we are upset about. Ask yourself what you are afraid of, as anger is almost always fear in disguise. If we think something or someone threatens us, we feel fear-fear that we are inadequate, that our lives are out of control, that things won't go our way. Then we fight. Find out what you're upset about. We rarely are upset for the reason we think.

Studies of people who report high well-being in their fifties and sixties indicate that they have lived lives that involved personal risks. They are not people whose lives have been calm and predictable. A life under tight control sometimes produces quiet desperation. High well-being is a life that has depth and quality. Risks, losses, problems, and tragedy add pain to a life. That pain becomes a teacher. We learn; the pain gives us no choice.

There are, of course, two kinds of suffering, that which has a reward and that which doesn't.