You know when you have experiences in your life that are so timely it’s surreal? I had one yesterday. I went to photograph the antiques at a woman’s home at Charlestown. Afterwards she asked me to sit and chat for a while. I don’t know how we got on the subject, but she started telling me about her life and her outlook on it.

She told me how in her day women walked two steps behind her husband. But not her. “I grew up with three brothers,” she said. “You either stood up for yourself or you got beat up.” Once married, she got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and started teaching special education.

At age 22 she had a radical mastectomy–and recovered. “I’ve had cancer so many times I don’t know why I’m alive,” she said. But she said it’s all in her outlook. She also went legaly blind because of medication. But she made the most of it. “If you think positively, positive things will happen to you. Life is what you make it,” she told me.

I say this experience was timely because I’ve recently been changing my outlook on life. I wanted something so bad that I thought wouldn’t happen, and that made me sad. But when I started just believing that it would happen someday, it did. Just like she said.

My friend just told me about a book called The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. She said it basically takes positive thinking to the extreme, saying that if you think positively, positive things will happen to you–just like the woman I met yesterday said. I haven’t read the book yet, but the idea sounds intriguing. I will read the book and give a review here on my blog.

In the mean time, has anyone read it? What do you think about the book and the ideas it discusses? Have you experienced the power of positive thinking? I look forward to reading your responses.

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