Sette Design: Gratitude -Wishing Works

I grew up in a little white wooden house that was spacious and had windows everywhere – oh it was so pretty. It was built in 1914 in a valley below a mountain, outside San Francisco. On the refrigerator in our kitchen my mother had stuck a button that said COMPLAINING with a circle around it and a red line through it. She later also had a photograph of herself, taken by one of those automatic cameras of her going through a red light, hands gripping the wheel, eyes dazed and searching. Her point to friends passing through our kitchen and to us children was stop complaining and laugh at your self.

Tomorrow in America is Thanksgiving Day a holiday where we gather around a table with friends and family and be thankful for the abundance of our lives (basically like every Sunday in Italy). To my mother’s philosophy I want to add gratitude. I understand that during the holidays some of us feel even more alone even in the presence of family or loved ones. Sometimes we feel that are lives are not where we wanted them to be or imagined them to be. I do know that life is hard and harder for some than others. To this I want to suggest a lesion in hope.

hope grows

I love to follow studies. I am so interested in trying to live a better life. I read all kinds of studies and then I bring them up to bug my friends or make a point. Here are a few examples. If there are two boys playing together and then another boy is introduced into their game, the two boys include the third boy right away. If you do the same with girls, they will not let the third girl in to play. They did a study about it. I drive my friends crazy quoting the “They”. If you drink five cups of coffee a day it decreases your chance of getting brain cancer. I love that study!

So I did my own study. I have a group of English speaking friends here and for many years we all got together to have a cup of tea on Wednesday afternoon. Our idea was to encourage our kids speak English and for us mothers to be able to feel less isolated and it truly helped us to understand the Italian culture too.

One afternoon when the tea party was at my house I had all the mothers and kids (it was a big group of us that day) write down a list of wishes. We didn’t have to tell the wishes if we didn’t want to, they could be kept a secret. Then we put them in envelopes and sealed them. I told all the kids and moms to really try to think about those wishes and to concentrate on them as much as possible, to work on them. In six months time we would open the envelopes and do our counts. Guess what... 42% of the wishes came true in a six- month period of time. Let me tell you some of the wishes were hard, like I want to learn to swim, some were ridiculous like I want Mama to have another baby. So this brought our group percentage down. It was also interesting to see how some of the kids had a higher percentage up to 70-80% of wishes coming true, this was related to their perception of reality and I believe it was related also to how hard they worked on those dreams. It also varied greatly within families. Some of the group wrote their wishes down and then forgot about them. I am also able to recount that I remember many of those wishes came true later as more time passed.

humm ... what are my wishes, there are so many

I will leave you with that story. I think I might just sneak away for another cappuccino, write a new list of wishes and see if might be able to play in the boys group.