Expect Great Things

How a cliche, world religions, or Grandma’s worldview will carry us through the next weeks and beyond.

Laura Nicole Diamond
4 min readOct 19, 2024

My thermostat is set to worry. I am not unique in this; it is a human default, our factory setting. It is the reason for gratitude journals and most religions, I dare say.

Lately, wars and messages of fear and worry pouring into our phones IN ALL CAPS from unknown numbers — FRIEND, DONATE NOW OR ALL IS LOST! — have ratcheted it up.

As a counterbalance to my naturally worried state, I came up with a plan during the recent Jewish high holidays (once again). Strive to adopt a different framework: to consciously choose less stress, to turn down the frantic-ness. What I mean is, the situation will be what it is without me adding a layer of “running-around-with-my-head-cut-off-ness” to it. A tame example: realizing I was running late for work, I chose not to surrender to my surging cortisol, which would not get me out the door faster. Rather, I remembered to breathe, tamely picked up my coffee cup and car keys, and walked out of my way to another room to kiss my husband goodbye, which got me to the office at the same time, and with a much-improved mood.

I bore this philosophy in mind again the other morning while walking through my town on my way to my group therapy writing group. Though I was running late (sensing a theme?), I remembered not to freak out about it, and knew it would be fine.

Instead, as I walked, I thought about my late Grandma Lilli, as I often do. I thought about how cool it was that my son had texted earlier that morning that we should celebrate her birthday with a game night. It struck me as beautiful and astounding that the great-grandson of a woman who passed seven years earlier, when he was sixteen, knew it was her birthday. And wanted to celebrate her.

It was those thoughts that carried me along the sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard, past the kitschy store that my niece told me I probably wouldn’t want to patronize anymore because she’d heard it was owned by far-right anti-abortion types. It is the kind of store with snarky birthday cards and Malibu-themed coffee table books and raunchy card games and yes I have bought things there, but now I was content to glance in its windows as I passed. An ugly-ish pillow in the display caught my eye: “Always Believe Great Things Will Happen,” it proclaimed in pink letters on black fabric.

It occurred to me that it was the mindset my grandmother walked around with most of the time (even though she was a high-level worrier, too).

Always believe that great things will happen.

The phrase hit me as I continued past the Mexican restaurant, the bank, the bagel shop: imagine the way adopting that philosophy would change how you feel in any moment. There I was, a couple of weeks before a national election that consumed my non-work reading and thinking time with so much fear and worry. Rather than worry, why not expect a great thing to happen, and imagine how I’ll feel when we win? The worry won’t change the outcome. I may as well feel excited and hopeful than crappy and down in the meantime.

Leave it to an a-hole store’s kitschy pillow to give me a life-affirming message.

I was trying out these new feels and enjoying how they lifted me when, half a block from my destination, I spotted the handsome guy I married twenty-six years before, walking my way as he returned from a swim at the high school pool.

The pillow’s admonition struck again! Rather than just seeing this as a cool coincidence of timing, the sage pillow elevated our chance meeting into a “great thing.”

So even more than prompting a mindset change from worry to optimism, “expecting great things to happen” made me more apt to notice a “great thing” when it appeared. More, it transformed the mundane into great. Again, my grandmother’s voice sang in my ears, memories of sitting around her condo’s pool area as she named a random take-out lunch “the best party I ever went to.”

The late writer Amy Kraus Rosenthal spoke of this at length and with great wisdom in her “Beckon the Lovely” Ted Talk (which I’ve written about before): what we look for, we see and bring toward us.

Times are fraught. Stakes are high. Even after the most pressing current concerns pass, there will be new situations to fret over. We humans have to push ourselves to overcome our bulging worry-muscle memory. I know I return to this theme here often; it is necessary.

Do whatever you need. Write it in Sharpie on your hand. Say a gratitude prayer in the morning and at night. Print this post. Stitch some words on a pillow. Or even, if you must, buy one.

Laura Nicole Diamond is the author of Shelter Us: a novel, Dance with Me: A love letter, and editor of Deliver Me: True Confessions of Motherhood. She is a civil rights lawyer focused on immigration since 2018. Follow her on LauraNicoleDiamond.com. Facebook, and Instagram. (She used to post on Twitter, and when Elon’s gone, maybe will again.)

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