Recognize the woman in the picture with me? It’s Gretchen Rubin, the writer who has done so much to shape my thinking on happiness, and now on habits. She was on the cover of Parade magazine this past Sunday, so she may look familiar to you even if you haven’t heard of her. (Sigh. As with a number of other images, this one did not survive our site migration. So this is just Gretchen’s author pic from Amazon.)
Gretchen’s on tour right now promoting her latest book Better than Before, and last night she was at the downtown Denver Tattered Cover Bookstore. I was determined to go and see her in person, especially since I missed out on the last time she was in Denver two years ago.Usually, even in the most successful outing, there’s some hitch or glitch, but once in a while you get it pretty much right. Last evening was one of those times. My dear friend Carolyn and I had our books and signing tickets ahead of time, we had no problems with parking or getting a meal beforehand, and we ended up sitting on the very front row at the presentation. Gretchen’s talk was just great (even though I’d have to confess that between reading her blog every single day and reading the book beforehand I’d already heard much of it) and the question-and-answer session could have gone on much longer. People were just so eager to ask questions–none of those uncomfortable lulls you usually get. I even asked one: “What has been your toughest habit to establish?” Her answer? Exercise. She says that it’s a struggle for her to overcome her couch potato tendencies. Our tickets were #14 and 15, so we were in the very first group to go up and get our books signed, which meant that we were able to zip out of the parking garage without any wait.
I said that I got it “pretty much right,” but I have to confess one tiny little fly (or perhaps a gnat) in the ointment, and it was purely something I did to myself: I worried that there weren’t going to be very many people there. I didn’t think that the bookstore was publicizing the event nearly enough on their website, and by Tuesday, the day before, they had sold only 30 books with tickets. I kept envisioning an embarrassingly nearly-empty room. When we got down there last evening we checked in at the store before going off to get dinner to ask how early we should be on site, and the guy at the register said, “Oh, you’ll probably be fine if you get here by 6:45.” (The event was at 7:00.) “Really?” I said. “Not earlier?” He made a moue. “We haven’t really sold many tickets for this event.” I was very taken aback. How was this possible? Would Denver go down in infamy as the place that dissed Gretchen Rubin? After dinner, around 6:30, we went back to the bookstore. No lines. No crowds. We made our way down to the meeting room and saw that there was a small group of perhaps 50. So at least we weren’t the only ones there. But as the minutes ticked by, people kept trickling in and they kept setting up more chairs. When we turned around at the end of the talk we could see that the entire back of the room was full. So it turned out okay. The woman who’s sold millions of books got a very decent attendance. Whew! As if it had anything to do with me! I talk in my own book about this very weird tendency to let our emotions be controlled by the empathy we have for the emotions of others. We want to be empathetic, of course, but we shouldn’t let the imagined emotions of others affect our own peace of mind–if at all possible. In this case my worrying was completely unnecessary anyway, and would still have been unnecessary had Carolyn and I been the only ones there. Always good to carry home a life lesson from a fun event, I guess.