We are our stories.Within those stories come moments. Those moments transform and define who we are in some form, both good and bad, with enlightenment, joy, sadness through instruments of change.These are moments of a developing life. This book translates moments that transformed me into how I have lived and continue to live my life. The moments stated in this book often affected those involved in my change, including family, friends, and those unknowns I have crossed paths with throughout my life. I live richly. Moments of profound change in their different iterations are noted throughout the pages of this book.Remembering defining moments throughout life is a universal endeavor and, in many cases, not all, a blessing.

The New York Times bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick explore why certain brief experiences can jolt us and elevate us and change us—and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work. While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children? This book delves into some fascinating mysteries of experience: Why we tend to remember the best or worst moment of an experience, as well as the last moment, and forget the rest. Why “we feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not.” And why our most cherished memories are clustered into a brief period during our youth. Readers discover how brief experiences can change lives, such as the experiment in which two strangers meet in a room, and forty-five minutes later, they leave as best friends. (What happens in that time?) Or the tale of the world’s youngest female billionaire, who credits her resilience to something her father asked the family at the dinner table. (What was that simple question?) Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck—but why would we leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? The Power of Moments shows us how to be the author of richer experiences.

You can't go back. You can't go back. You can't go back. Ten years ago, Wendy Lake fell in love with Simon Guidry, who grew up and went away. Now, not much has changed. She's back at home, back from college, almost back to normal. Until Wendy's best friend gets engaged, sending Simon ricocheting back into her life, and leaving Wendy with the questions she's been struggling to ignore. Do people ever really change? Do two people, who can never make it work, actually make it right? And most importantly, does she even want to?

Where do you seek God? Are you waiting for him to appear in a monumental, life-altering event? In God Moments, Catholic blogger Andy Otto shows you how to discover the unexpected beauty of God’s presence in the story of ordinary things and in everyday routines like preparing breakfast or walking in the woods. Drawing on the Ignatian principles of awareness, prayer, and discernment, Otto will help you discover the transforming power of God’s presence in your life and better understand your place in the world. Andy Otto found God’s presence in surprising moments during his life—when, as a Jesuit scholastic, he taught children in Jamaica and also as he discerned the call to marriage with his wife. By combining elements of Ignatian spirituality with the lessons that came from his experiences, Otto identified three practices that helped him find God in all things: Awareness—Gain an understanding that God is present in the ordinary messiness of our lives such as battle with depression or sharing in the struggle of a friend. Prayer—Develop a prayer life using Ignatian practices such as asking for a morning grace and examining how your prayer was answered at the end of the day. That way you can focus on a personal relationship with God that finds everyday physical activities such as making a meal as an opportunity to talk to him. Discernment—The more you are aware of God’s presence and draw closer to him in prayer, the better you can learn how to plug into God’s narrative of the world in a way that enables you to participate in the divine story through the use of your gifts and talents. With God Moments as a guide, you’ll have a better understanding of how to seek personal wholeness in the reality of God’s presence in the ordinary and learn to accept his invitation to participate in his transformation of the world.

To many of us, the experiences that we grew up taking for granted leave become distant dreams in our adult lives: marriages that last a lifetime; safe neighborhoods to call home; the certainty that our children will have a better life than we did; and most of all, lots of time to spend as we wish, living for the moment. Instead, we find our time and energy spent recovering from the past or protecting ourselves from the future. The result is a desperate, sometimes dangerous, and often unsuccessful, search for meaning in our lives. In Real Moments, Barbara De Angelis defines happiness not as an acquisition, but as a skill--the skill of capturing every moment and living it completely. With insight, wisdom, and vision, she teaches us how to rediscover real moments with our mates and our children, with our work and our play, in sex and intimacy, and real moments with ourselves. It is an examination of our relationship with the process of living itself, offering inspiration as well as practical tools for creating more of one of the most precious moments of all--moments of true meaning in our lives.

During the Civil War era, black and white North Carolinians were forced to fundamentally reinterpret the morality of suicide, divorce, and debt as these experiences became pressing issues throughout the region and nation. In Moments of Despair, David Silkenat explores these shifting sentiments. Antebellum white North Carolinians stigmatized suicide, divorce, and debt, but the Civil War undermined these entrenched attitudes, forcing a reinterpretation of these issues in a new social, cultural, and economic context in which they were increasingly untethered from social expectations. Black North Carolinians, for their part, used emancipation to lay the groundwork for new bonds of community and their own interpretation of social frameworks. Silkenat argues that North Carolinians' attitudes differed from those of people outside the South in two respects. First, attitudes toward these cultural practices changed more abruptly and rapidly in the South than in the rest of America, and second, the practices were interpreted through a prism of race. Drawing upon a robust and diverse body of sources, including insane asylum records, divorce petitions, bankruptcy filings, diaries, and personal correspondence, this innovative study describes a society turned upside down as a consequence of a devastating war.