I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier. Years ago, my husband and I fixed up a very close friend

with another less close friend. They worked, it fell in love, it was great. But within a few years

he got sick. She stood by him through it all. Then he died. It was awful. And it was very, very

hard on our good friend. It was a sad situation for many reasons. As the years passed, one thing

continued to bother me. I felt we had put a beloved friend in the path to sorrow. It had been

inadvertent and well-intentioned, but still we had brought all this pain into our good friend's life.

I mentioned this to my husband and he said something that completely changed my thinking.

He said, yes, it was very hard on her. But think how much better it was for him.

This thought, obvious as it was, had never occurred to me. I realized how often I make this error.

I was acting as though my friend was the main character of this story, that she was the one who

really mattered. And then I saw that I make this mistake all the time. I'm the most main character

of course, and then the people closest to me and so on. With some people just appearing as

extras or in walk-on roles. But that's not true. Everyone is a main character, and everyone is a

supporting character. And as I started thinking about this, I realized that some of my favorite

happiness passages concerned exactly this shift, someone reinterpreting a situation by understanding

how different circumstances would seem if someone else were placed in the starring role.

All of these have haunted me, but only now do I see what theme links them together.

And here are two of my favorite examples. Reading writer Flannery O'Connor's letters in the

habit of being led me to the extraordinary 1961 book, A Memoir of Marianne. A memoir about

a little girl, Marianne, who lived with a gruesome tumor on her face before dying of cancer,

written by the nuns with whom she lived for several years in a free cancer treatment home.

Near the end of Marianne's life, a five-month-old baby Stephanie was brought to the cancer home.

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