If optimism could keep this man alive, it can keep you going too...

When Bryna Kranzler sifted through her grandfather’s diaries, she was struck by how his humor and optimism kept him alive during times of unimaginable hardship...

As a Jewish army officer at a time of great anti-Semitism, Jacob Marateck fought through the Russo-Japanese War, escaped three death sentences, and survived exile in a Siberian labor camp.

When his comrades were bleeding, freezing, or starving as bombs exploded around them, suicide started to seem like a rational decision.

Yet somehow Marateck dug deep – not just for the fellow soldiers who attached their survival to his, but for the family who’d already been (falsely) notified of his death repeatedly.

The fact that he came so close to being executed several times - only for something miraculous to happen - seemed to give him the resilience to survive one ordeal after another...

Kranzler adapted two decades’ worth of her grandfather’s journals into the book The Accidental Anarchist. But something didn’t make sense. Her own struggles were nowhere near comparable to what her grandfather went through – and yet she couldn’t summon even a fraction of his optimism.

Then Kranzler read an article about post-traumatic growth: cases of people plummeting into hopelessness only to discover a determination to persevere. It helped her realize how many positive events pass us by every day: simple things we so often deem unworthy of attention.

Learning to recognize “ordinary magic” helped Kranzler tune into the same mindset her grandfather cultivated. Without it, Marateck wouldn’t have dropped a note on the street while being led to prison for execution – a note found by a young girl who alerted his family just in time to intervene.

The same optimism propelled Marateck through a 3,000-mile escape from Siberia, with no money or documents, before attempting to find the girl who saved him. Piecing together clues from faded memories, his quest persisted until she became his wife – the grandmother Kranzler is named after.

The message here is that just being aware of what’s going right has a magnetic effect on positivity. Some people have to learn to tap into that attitude, while others seem to be born with it. The magic of optimism isn’t always easy to find, but everybody can access it.