"I did not choose positive psychology. It called me. It was what I wanted from the very first, but experimental psychology and then clinical psychology were the only games in town that were even close to what was calling me. I have no less mystical way to put it. Vocation — being called to act rather than choosing to act — is an old word, but it is a real thing. Positive psychology called to me just as the burning bush called to Moses.
Sociologists distinguish among a job, a career, and a calling. You do a job for the money, and when the money stops, you stop working. You pursue a career for the promotions, and when the promotions stop, topped out, you quit or become a time-serving husk. A calling, in contrast, is done for its own sake. You would do it anyway, with no pay and no promotions. 'Try to stop me!' is what your heart cries when you are thwarted.
"Each month, I hold an optional movie night with popcorn, wine, pizza, and pillows on the floor. I show movies that convey positive psychology better than lectures full of words, but devoid of musical sounds and cinematic sights, can. I have always opened with Groundhog Day, and even after having seen it for the fifth time, I am still stunned by how much it presses us, yearning, toward positive personal transformation. I have shown The Devil Wears Prada, a movie about integrity — that of Meryl Streep, the boss from hell, and not of Anne Hathaway, the 'fat' one; The Shawshank Redemption, and it is not Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) the falsely accused banker, who is redeemed, but the narrator, Red (Morgan Freeman); Chariots of Fire, with the embodiment of three motives to win: Eric Liddell running for God; Lord Andrew Linley, for beauty; and Harold Abrahams, for self and tribe; and Sunday in the Park with George, which even on its twenty-fifth viewing still moves me to tears during the transcendent last scene of the first act in which art, children, Paris, and what abides and what is ephemeral in life are suffused.
"Last year I ended the series with Field of Dreams, a work of genius, even better than W. P. Kinsella's haunting novel Shoeless Joe, on which it is based."
