One night about ten o’clock, I was sitting upstairs in my home office working on this very chapter about happiness. It was late, but I was behind on my deadline, and I needed to use every spare minute in the days to come to complete the book on time. Needless to say, I was feeling like I was under a lot of pressure.
For weeks, I’d been writing and rewriting my thoughts on this first secret about happiness. I was particularly excited about the idea that each of us has the choice to be unhappy or happy in a given moment. In fact, I was enjoying this concept so much that when I heard a strange noise coming from downstairs, I ignored it, and kept writing. As I tried to find examples that would help me explain this understanding to you, I was aware in some part of my brain that there seemed to be a sound of gushing water in the background of my consciousness, but I assumed it was raining out, or that the dishwasher was on.
An hour and a half passed, and it was time to take a break. “That’s odd,” I commented to myself as I got up and began walking down the stairs. “That sound is still going on.” As I put my foot down from the last step onto the living room floor, I was shocked to discover that I was stepping into six inches of water! The whole downstairs of my house was flooded, and what had been a faint noise of water now sounded like the roar of Niagara Falls coming from the pantry off the kitchen. I waded through the cold water as fast as I could, and when I opened the door into the pantry, a huge waterfall that was cascading from the ceiling came crashing down on me, instantly drenching my body from head to toe.
“Oh my God,” I thought. “My whole house is flooding!” My next thought was, “Oh no, this can’t be happening now.” You see, I had just decided to move, and had put my house up for sale. We had a big open house scheduled in two days. And here I was in the middle of a flood.
I waded back into the kitchen, called 911, which connected me with the fire department, and then ran around assessing the situation. I could hardly believe my eyes. Half a foot of water covered everything—the bottom of the furniture, the carpets, anything that was on the floor. A strong current of water continued to pour from the pantry through the kitchen, into the living room, and all the way down the hall, carrying all kinds of items with it. I just shook my head in shock and amazement as I saw my dogs’ beds floating by like boats on a stream.
I got the dogs and cat safely into a dry room just in time to answer the door. Three long, red fire trucks had arrived, and there on my doorstep stood twelve tall, muscular firemen all dressed in their hats and coats and loaded down with ropes, hoses, axes, and special equipment of every sort. I could tell from the looks on their faces that they were just as amazed at my appearance as I was at theirs—I resembled a drowned rat. My hair was plastered down on my head, my clothes were soaked all the way through, and my glasses were so wet that I could barely see.
Within two minutes, the supervisor had located the source of the problem—a hose that connected the water supply to the washing machine had developed a tiny crack, and the hundreds of pounds of water pressure that ran through the pipes had burst through the small tear and obviously had been pouring through my house for the past hour and a half. “You’re lucky you were home,” he shouted over the loud roar. “A few more hours, and your whole house could have been ruined, or you could have had an electrical fire.” He turned off the valve and the water mercifully stopped.
Suddenly, everything was quiet, except for the sloshing sounds of the firemen walking through the rooms to determine how many pumps they would need to remove the water from my house. And then, I noticed something that completely amazed me: I was totally calm. In fact, I had been totally calm the whole time. Concerned, yes. Worried, definitely. But when I checked, I could still feel this sense of well-being and warmth inside of me.
“This is weird,” I remember thinking. “I should be really upset about this! My house is flooded. I’m standing here soaking wet in the middle of the night with firemen pumping gallons of water from my home. There is going to be major damage to my possessions and the structure. I am going to have to spend all kinds of time and money repairing it. The house sale will be delayed. I’ll have to take time from my writing to do all this, and my book won’t be finished in time.”
The longer I thought about what was happening, the more suspicious I got about my state of mind. Maybe I was in shock. Maybe the severity of the situation just hadn’t sunk in yet. But in the hours that followed, I became aware of something even more strange than my lack of unhappiness about the flood—I was actually enjoying myself! The firemen were all very nice and helpful, and I kidded them about how sweet it was of them to come up in the middle of the night to clean all my floors. They had recognized me from television, and teased me about how glamorous I looked soaking wet with a mop in my hand. The guys went about their business of trying to get the water out of my house with vacuums and special hoses, and I went about my business of picking up all the things that lay soaking on the floor. Somehow, I was having a good time.
I’d noticed one particular fireman grinning at me whenever I went by, and at one point, I walked past him with my arms full of dripping wet towels. He glanced up from his equipment and with a mischievous look on his face, said, “So Barbara: Are you having a ‘real moment’?”
My book Real Moments® had been about learning how to make each experience in life meaningful. This guy had obviously read the book, and figured that I probably wasn’t having an enjoyable “real moment” right then, and decided to tease me about it.
“You know,” I answered with a smile, “I actually AM having a real moment right now!” And I was. Somehow, I was happy. Certainly, I was not pleased with the flood or the mess or the impending cleanup. But on the inside, I still felt a state of contentment and peace that this incident had not been able to steal from me. I was grateful that I had been home. I was grateful that the firemen came so quickly. I was grateful that nothing worse had happened.
It was long past midnight when the firemen had most of the water out of the house and had packed up to leave. By this time, we were all good buddies. On a whim, I ran upstairs to get my camera, and there in the middle of my wet living room we all posed for pictures together. They probably thought I was crazy, but I didn’t care. I was having fun! And that was my thought as I waved good-bye to them and watched their big trucks drive away: “This was fun!”
When I went upstairs to turn off my computer, I looked at the screen and read the last thing I’d written before I’d gone downstairs and discovered the flood:
Nothing can make you happy without your permission.
Nothing can make you unhappy without your permission.
Standing there in my damp clothes, I knew that what I’d written was true. I had not allowed the flood to make me unhappy. It was just a series of neutral events, events that I easily could have used to make myself miserable but didn’t. In fact, I’d found moments of joy, connection, and gratitude in the experience. I’d practiced the very principle I was writing about, and it had worked. The universe had actually given me a great gift that evening, one I would never forget.
That night as I lay in bed, I suddenly remembered a line I’d included in my proposal to the publisher for this book: “You can’t stop the flood, but you can learn to build an ark.”
Little did I know back then how prophetic these words were going to be. The flood had, indeed, come. And the ark of my own inner state of happiness had remained intact.
I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
The foolish person seeks happiness in the distance; the wise person grows it under his feet.
JAMES OPPENHEIM