Radio Shangri-La by Lisa Napoli ✔✔✔

The author, a radio journalist in Los Angeles, was looking for a change in her life, and a chance encounter led her to travel to Bhutan - said to be one of the happiest places on earth - to volunteer her expertise to help develop a youth-oriented radio station. And for this reason, in her own words: " I longed for a way of life in which people made it a priority to look into each other's eyes and communicate, soul-to-soul....I yearned for meandering conversations about all things important, all things banal. Bhutan, I imagined, might be as close as you could get on earth to what I'd been craving - a real,live, actual community, where being wired took a backseat to being present, face-to-face, experiencing the here and now"

The book is mainly a travel memoir, and gives a good look at this remote Himalayan kingdom, and it certainly had some interesting people in it. The trip from the airport alone would be enough to keep me from going! But what I enjoyed most of all was the preface to the book, for in here Napoli describes a positive psychology workshop that she took while in LA, and some of the questions used by the workshop leader to help people discover "what we appreciated in ourselves, and what inspired us about others":

1. Describe in detail a person you love - and why.
2. 'write a toast to four difficult periods in your life and how you handled them
3. Summarize your life story as if you were 90 and telling a child.

He also assigned them a nightly exercise to teach them how to appreciate life in its most basic terms. Every night before going to sleep, review your day and make a short list of three things that happened that were good. "I want you to see that every single day, three good things do happen. It will help you discover that goodness exists all around us, already". Those good things are the most nourishing to our life. It's like a gym for the brain: over time this ritual with strengthen you.

And what did Lisa learn? "I was learning to slow down, to sit with myself and the uncertainties of the future. To enjoy not knowing what was next, instead of fearing and panicking over what might be. To appreciate the successes I'd had, instead of dwelling on my failure to have accomplished more".

Good stuff and worth thinking about.