Sublime

“One of the greatest gifts you can give others,” Dan Schwab, director of training and development for a large nonprofit organization, told us, “is the understanding that they can think bigger things than they believe they can.

Love unfolds and reverberates between and among people—within interpersonal transactions—and thereby belongs to all parties involved, and to the metaphorical connective tissue that binds them together, albeit temporarily.

I think perceiving the good takes practice.

One of the overarching messages of this research is that by focusing attention on what’s right rather than what’s wrong, and learning how to be resilient against negativity, we can guard ourselves against protracted setbacks and live a happier, more fulfilling life.

Dr. Samantha Boardman, a Harvard-, Cornell-, and University of Pennsylvania–trained positive psychologist and the author of Everyday Vitality,

the two of you are quite literally on the same wavelength, biologically.

“Everything I do is in a spirit of service,” she told me. “I feel driven by it. It’s a moral imperative.”7 Putting it more succinctly, she said: “Art saves lives.”

According to Fredrickson, when we experience positive emotions, we’re more likely to have novel thoughts, take on new challenges, and embrace new experiences. On the other hand, negative emotions tend to make us narrow our possibilities. Negative emotions constrain our thoughts and behavior.