Vancouver author Stephen Altschuler spent his 35-year career as a mental health counselor in the toughest of settings, like state prisons. He’s also the survivor of several serious health challenges, including depression and cancer.
“You pick up a lot of wisdom that way,” he said. “At age 77, I’ve got some things to offer.”
“To Live a Life,” the latest in a series of books Altschuler has published through his own Sacajawea Press, is subtitled “200 Ways to Be the Best Person You Can Be.” It’s an occasionally tough yet relentlessly uplifting approach to finding happiness and spreading it to others.
Altschuler serves up his seasoned wisdom in digestible chunks — some just a few sentences, few longer than one page — that play off entertaining, thought-provoking epigrams. He draws insight worth commenting upon from sources as varied as Buddhist monks, Catholic saints, nursery rhymes, President Abraham Lincoln, Taylor Swift and Altschuler’s own “Jewish Bubbah … up in heaven.”
If You Go
What: Author Stephen Altschuler reads from “To Live a Life: 200 Ways to Be the Best Person You Can Be”
When: 2 p.m. Saturday
Where: Birdhouse Books, 1001 Main St., Vancouver
Admission: Free
On the web: www.stephenaltschuler.com
His book is “a manual you can open up anywhere and get a little help to have a good day,” he said.
You probably already know what a good day really means, Altschuler said. One simple yet subtle key to human happiness is learning how to get out of your own way, he suggested. To that end, Altschuler said he’s always pursued the unconventional path of “an explorer” of life. In addition to helping with the hardest cases, he’s delved into Buddhism and backpacking, written about the psychology of golf (“The Mindful Golfer”), lived alone for years in a cabin in the Massachusetts woods (like Thoreau, one of his heroes), and strummed his guitar to entertain nursing home patients.
Altschuler said he can relate to the loss that older people endure. Key wisdom in “To Live a Life” involves active listening and actively respecting our elders. At our own peril, he writes, we live in a culture that prizes youth over experience, and speed over perspective and patience.
Altschuler said his career has taught him to see the humanity in everyone he meets. He describes a murderer who lovingly tended stray cats in one Massachusetts prison where he worked.
“Compassion lies at the root of all religions,” he writes.
He stresses that what goes around comes around. One day, he got to thinking about all the gifts life had given him.
“I simply walked into a nursing home, introduced myself to the activities director, and started volunteering every week for the next two years,” he writes. “Later, I used a reference from the (activities director) to get an excellent paying job doing similar work.”
That was an obvious win for him, he writes. “And seeing the smiling faces of the residents from week to week showed me it was a win for them as well.”
The key to happiness, he writes, is finding your own purpose in life — the thing that ought to propel you out of bed with eagerness to face the day.
That may not be easy, but Altschuler’s prime observation may be that every adversity holds the seed of equal or greater benefit.
Growing it, however, is up to you.
“The adversity itself doesn’t lead to a greater benefit,” he writes. “You need to help nurture that seed to sprout and grow.”
