EVENT REVIEW • A SPILL OR TWO KEEPS YOUR GLASS HALF FULL // COMMUNITY, BOOKS
There's got to be some irony to the fact that on one of the sunniest Saturdays we've had here in Ottawa in a while, I was sitting in a dark, air-conditioned theatre listening to three authors talk about optimism.
Joel Yanofsky, Shari Graydon, and Neil Pasricha were joined together in positivity to share their pearls of wisdom, and, let's be serious, promote their books. Over the course of a couple of hours, each author spoke about a range of things that inspired their books and their outlooks on life. Topics discussed were: parenting, marriage, aging, autism, divorce, and even suicide. Not exactly sunshine and lollipops, I know. However, when speaking about the themes of their books, each author reminded me that wrinkles, tantrums, and lost loves were indeed the very things that helped polish up their shiny attitudes.
For Shari Graydon, author of the book, I Feel Great About My Hands, her glass-half-full is described as a “face half-wrinkled approach” to life. A collection of 50 contributions from women from across Canada, Shari's book is about “women reflecting on the benefits of maturity.” With essays from the likes of Elizabeth May and Mary Walsh to compositions from women across all walks of life in our country, the book celebrates aging, wrinkled hands and all. Graydon humbly spoke about taking full credit for the book; instead, she extended the praise to all of the other contributors. She didn't stop there, as she explained that all of the proceeds from I Feel Great About My Hands will go to a non-profit organization called Media Action, specifically to a project called "Informed Opinions" that works towards a fairer, more balanced representation of women's voices in the media.
While half-jokingly sharing the unofficial rules for writing a book, Joel Yanofsky explained, "...rules for writing a book: 1. Have something bad happen to you. 2. Be prepared to be brutally honest." Sitting there hearing these words, I noticed that all three of these glass-half-full writers met these criteria. With a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour, Joel spoke about his book, Bad Animals, in which he writes about his and his wife's journey raising their autistic son. Joel said: “it was my attempt to make myself a better person, even if I didn’t want to be.” The book is also about acceptance: “much like my son, I had to learn everything the hard way.” With a transparency about him, still sprinkled with a little self-pity, Yanofsky said, “I realized I had to become a better person, just so I could be a better character in the book.”
A self-described "lucky" guy, Neil Pasricha also spoke about the fact that personal tragedy helped him realign his outlook. In the span of a year, his marriage ended and he lost a close friend to suicide. Instead of succumbing to the downward spiral one might expect in such hard times, Pasricha started his blog, 1000awesomethings.com, and his two books followed, the most recent being The Book of (Even More) Awesome. Neil's blog wasn’t a cure-all though, as he explained that the process of keeping your glass half-full restarts each day: “we get to choose our attitude every morning when we get out of bed,” he said. Although he took some hits in his 20s, prior to that Neil had a very positive upbringing, in large part due to his curious, immigrant parents. “I grew up with a sense of wonder”. In the end, his advice for a glass-half-full approach is simply to consciously notice the many things around us that bring happiness, as they truly are everywhere. "The act of focusing on [the awesome things] helps us find them," he explained.
As I sat in the air-conditioned theatre and thought about this very idea of noticing the awesome things in your daily life, I stretched my long legs and smiled.
In case you were wondering, I got an aisle seat, and that was awesome.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival, May 2011.