Human Moments is unlike any book available today. Renowned author Edward Hallowell proposes a simple, effective way to find happiness and love in this totally unique guide to living a fulfilling life. Dr. Hallowell teaches us how to recognize and appreciate a "human moment," an instance when we recognize and connect to things that really matter most in life and make it worth living. An engaging storyteller, Hallowell uses his own personal experiences from a traumatic childhood to a prosperous adulthood to illustrate concepts and connect with readers. Skillfully he teaches us how to recognize human moments when they happen, how to savor them, treasure them, and turn them into an enriching experience. Best of all, he reveals how human moments are happening to us all the time-in fact, every day. Hallowell forms each chapter around narratives of intensely moving stories from his own life and embellishes them with personal accounts and reflections from others. He concludes each one with suggestions on "creating connections" in our own lives through which we find true meaning and love. For all those engaged in the ongoing work of personal growth and life enrichment, Human Moments is at once poignant and inspiring, uplifting and endearing-an unforgettable book that will awaken hearts and change lives.

Introduction Where Meaning and Love Abide The most reliable places to find meaning and love in your everyday life are in moments that affect you emotionally and move you most deeply. I call these human moments. The most reliable places find human moments are in the connections you make. I am not referring to your business connections, of course, but to the connections of your heart. The people and the places that you love. The part of work you really care about. The children you raise and the grandchildren they may give you. The friends you trust. The pets you adore. The garden (or any pastime) that you fuss over. Even the teams you fanatically root for. All these connections lead to human moments. We hold these moments in our hearts, long after they occur, and feed on them when we are hungry for something to lift our spirits, or simply for something that we believe in and care about. I adopt as a credo what the poet, John Keats, wrote almost two centuries ago: ôI am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heartÆs affections.ö That is the subject of this book: the holiness of the heartÆs affections, the importance of our most heartfelt connections and the human moments they lead to every day in so many different, wonderful ways. Life is just a series of mostly forgettable events unless we loveùand love in as many different ways as we can, from loving a person to a book to spirit to a place to an idea to a dog-to almost anything. With love, we endow certain moments with a special power and significance. With love, and its cousin, imagination, we conjure up the richness and power that lies beneath the surface of even the most trivial second in our lives. By the power of love and imagination we turn ordinary, inert moments into what I call human moments, those moments when we feel connected to someone or something outside of ourselves and in the presence of what matters, what we call meaning. Heartfelt connections and the human moments they engender are what make life good. Of course, how we rank them changes over time. When I was in high school my vision of heaven was sitting on the third base line at Fenway Park in the ninth inning of a never-ending game that I was guaranteed the Red Sox would ultimately win. Now, my vision of heaven is sitting at a table in some restaurant where my wife Sue and my three kids (frozen in time at their current ages, eleven, eight, and five) and all my friends are eating a dinner that goes on forever. But until we get to heaven, nothing goes on forever. We donÆt have time to wait. We have to make these connections matter now-these relationships, passions, and interests-if we are to draw out of them all the juice they have to give. In this country, most of us actually have what we need to be happy. The challenge is to make what we have matter-matter now, today-and matter enough. The basic ingredients of a happy life are simple. They include friends and neighbors; relatives; some work you like; pe

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Excerpted from Human Moments: How to Find Meaning and Love in Your Everyday Life by Edward M. Hallowell
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