دانلود کتاب زندگی را که می خواهید بسازید – هنر و علم شادتر شدن

From Arthur: Albina Quevedo, my mother-in-law, whom I loved like my own mother, lay in her bed in the small Barcelona apartment she had occupied for the past seventy years. The bedroom’s austere decor had never changed: a picture on one wall of her native Canary Islands; a simple crucifix on another. This was what she saw nearly twenty-four hours a day, since a fall two years earlier had left her in pain and unable to get up or walk by herself. At ninety-three, she knew she was in her last months.
Her body was weak, but her mind was still sharp and her memories vivid. She talked about decades past, times when she was youthful, healthy, newly married, and starting her beloved family. She reminisced about parties and days at the beach with close friends, now long dead. She laughed as she remembered those good times.
“Such a difference with my life now,” she said. She turned her head on the pillow and looked out the window for a long time, lost in thought. Turning back, she said, “I am much happier than I was back then.”
She looked over at my surprised face, and explained. “I know it sounds strange because my life now seems bleak, but it’s true,” she said with a smile. “As I’ve aged, I have learned the secret to getting happier.”
I was all ears now.
As I sat at her bedside, Albina recounted the trials of her life. As a little girl in the 1930s, she had lived through the brutal Spanish Civil War, some of it in hiding, often going hungry and seeing death and suffering all around her. Her father was arrested and spent years in prison for serving on the losing side of that conflict as a battlefield surgeon. Despite that, she always saw her childhood as a happy one, because her parents loved her and loved each other, and this love was the memory that endured most clearly. And speaking of love, the man in the prison cell next to her father’s introduced her to her future husband.
So far, so good. But that’s when trouble started for Albina. After a few good years and the births of three children, her husband turned out to be less than stellar, abandoning her without child support and plunging them into poverty. Her sadness over being deserted was compounded by the pressures of raising kids alone, while sometimes wondering if she could keep the lights on.
For several years, she felt stuck and miserable, concluding that a happier life was unavailable as long as the world dealt her this very bad hand. Almost every day, she would look out the front window of her small apartment and cry.
Who could blame her? Her poverty and loneliness, which made her miserable, were not of her doing—they had been imposed on her, and she couldn’t see a way to change them. As long as her circumstances didn’t change, her unhappiness would persist, and a better life seemed impossible.