Attitude Really Is Everything

My friend, Cindi, brought this to my attention. It is a quote from Margaret Salinger, JD Salinger's daughter.
"It's hard work to find the proper balance, the point of equinox for oneself. My friend Jacobo Timerman told me something nearly 20 years ago, when he was newly released from torture in a clandestine jail in Argentina. To this day, it remains the single most useful thing anyone has ever said to me. I can't recreate the elegance of a lifelong journalist's language, but the gist of what he said is as follows. He asked me why I had such sad eyes. I didn't have an answer; that was part of the problem. I felt like an idiot for having sad eyes: I'd not been in jail, I'd not been tortured by the military. He said, It is a very hard thing to find happiness. Hundreds and thousands of examples exist of how to be miserable, and they are everywhere you look, for you to copy. It is _easy_ to be miserable, he said, millions can show you the way. It requires no thought or creativity of your own, just following. To be happy is hard, because no one can show you, it is something you have to work out, create for yourself. No one can give you a model to copy, though many will volunteer, because happiness is not off the rack, one size fits all, it is something each of us has to tailor-make fo rhimself or her self.

"Up until that point, I had felt ashamed of myself, as well as sad. He took the shame away. When I saw him off at the airport, he gave me a painting of a pasture, surrounded by barbed wire, in the highlands of Argentina. On the back of the painting he wrote, "Animo! Margarita" (which translates loosely as grab some life, fill yourself with life; it's a cry that urges you on, all that and more). "