Glad to Be Human : Adventures in Optimism (Positive Thinking Book, for Fans of Learned Optimism, Anne Lamott, or Elizabeth Gilbert)

Celebrate Life’s Simple Pleasures

"I am changed by these now dog-eared pages, and I will return to them again and again for inspiration.” —Annabel Monaghan, author of The Digit Series, columnist for The Week and The Huffington Post

In a world so often filled with distressing news and bewildering violence, being “human” often gets a bad rap. Rejoice in everyday reasons to smile with positive thoughts and enjoy the gift of life.

Take a walk on the bright side and celebrate life. In Glad to Be Human: Adventures in Optimism, award-winning writer Irene O’Garden reminds us of the radiance of human existence. From kitchens to gardens to busy city streets, all around, in your everyday life, you can find plenty of reasons to feel gratitude and hope and find joy.

It’s the little things. In this collection of essays, O’Garden explores a wide range of practical reasons to celebrate life?just look closely around you. In one essay, she describes the simple pleasure that comes from clearing clutter off a desk?in another, the thrill of visiting the Statue of Liberty. The book’s grand finale is the Pushcart Prize-winning essay, “Glad to Be Human.”

One simple message. Through contemplation, meditation and with literary style, Glad to Be Human invites you to view life through a positive lens. From small, daily activities to journeys overseas, O’Garden has a knack for finding beauty and meaning in all life’s adventures?even in our deepest pain and suffering?helping all of us feel glad to be human.

If you enjoy Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Anne Lamott, or books like Risking the Rapids, The Book of Joy, The Book of Delights, or The Gratitude Diaries, you’ll love O’Garden’s Glad to Be Human.

From Glad to Be Human

A Question of Gladness

Why is it even important to be glad to be human? We may be the only species that questions gladness.

If cells weren’t glad to be cells could they metabolize? Could they have the little cellular barn raisings that lead to the creation of petals or peanuts or pineal glands?

If atoms were ashamed of being atoms, could they even join atomic hands to make a cell for a while? They’d skip the dance and stay home. No whirling around tonight, honey. I’m just not up to making a cell. Why bother anyway? I’m not that great at doing it, and after all cells only die, so why even make one?

Humans cannot comprehend the larger body we compose, though we can feel its organs in a symphony orchestra, a sports team, a school, a hospital, a movie set. These larger selves need us to function just as we need the beings who compose our bodies. There is great joy when these larger bodies function well, because functioning well is the nature of Nature. Of course, any cell, plant or animal will tell you the purpose of life is not function, but joy.

This coursing sense of connected well-being, or gladness, is the default setting of each living creature and doubtless the inanimates as well. (If it’s all spinning particles, is anything really inanimate?) The holographic fractal beauty of physical reality is that gladness is important to each, and each is important to all.

I am personally glad to be safe and dry and educated and supplied and empowered and free of children, glad there are people glad to have children. Glad to choose, to help to nourish, to bless.

Glad to have coached a baby into this world, excruciating and exquisite. No sleep for twenty four hours, my sister twisting in the birthing bed, her husband and me squeezing her hand, feeding her ice, our very breaths as one till salty weepy laughter chokes out of us as the red hairy head appears.

Glad to be human for all the ages that surround me always, for the precious ability always to catch sight of a baby somewhere, a toddler and children, and the sweet pure unconsciousness of, even in anger, youth, staggering in its unknowing beauty. And the reposed beauty of lined faces, relaxing into life, tendered by experience, the comfort of the presence of wisdom, with vigor yet, a beauty like a leatherbound book. And the grace of elders realized in full capacity, inspiring as centuries-old trees, the crowning loveliness of natures fulfilled, experience like rings around them of their growth, not separate into years, these feelings, but sensed around them as a life, a single mighty sheath of living over their ordinary comings and goings, sap rising and falling in them in thin streams, surrounded by the immensity of their truth.