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to share the need to embellish day-to-day reality.Neuroscientist Tali Sharot of University College London discovered this in the course of exploring what she calls the “optimism bias,” the inherent tendency of the human brain to see things in a positive light. Her study focused on the brain function of people who were asked to imagine future events in their everyday lives. She presented the most innocuous of prompts to her participants: your next haircut, a trip on public transportation, a plane ride. But her subjects made the mundane magical. A haircut became an opportunity to donate hair to Locks of Love, an organization that creates hairpieces for young people who have lost their hair to cancer treatment. A ride on a ferry became a setting for romance. The flight was the beginning of a great adventure.
    Even more surprising is how creative we are about our past. “You’re constantly rearranging the narrative of your life,” says Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California. “And you’re rearranging as a function of the experiences that you have had and as what you imagine your experiences in the future ought to be.” Each time we retrieve a memory, we tend to revise or edit it, adding some new elements to the story and taking away others. In time, we decide that certain stories are representative of who we are and who we want to become. We rehearse them and we may share them with others. And we look to these stories for emotional guidance.
    Little by little, we choose to make our stories less hopeful or more so. Hopeful narratives steeped with meaning provide survival tools forthe storyteller and for the audience gathered around the campfire. The most hopeful stories trigger positive emotions in others, making them feel lifted up, joyful, or curious, and ultimately drawing them closer to us. These positive emotions also inspire others to think more expansively about their own life stories.
    Reliving previous experiences through hopeful stories also makes it likely that we will prelive a future experience with a hopeful bent. Right now, I am thinking about a speech I have to give to a large group of youth development experts in Omaha, Nebraska. I am preliving the event in vivid detail . . . and it is stressing me out. So I decide to relive one of my best public-speaking performances—March 2011 in Fairfax, Virginia. The story starts with my friend, Nance, telling me that I had done a great job and thanking me. She was so kind and generous in her praise; I can still see her bright smile. Then I see mental snapshots of me sharing ideas, playing a video that made the audience cry (in a good way), and giving folks a good laugh. Phew! Now I am less stressed and more positive about my yet-to-be talk in Omaha.
    Reliving and preliving help shape our lives. The stories of our past don’t predict the future, but they do help us find paths to where we want to go. By focusing on the what, when, and where of our experience, we can learn how to exercise the modicum of control we have over our future.
Sensing an End to the Journey
    Our capacity to look over the horizon has a downside—a big one. I alluded to it when I described Neanderthal funeral rituals.Our special awareness of the future gives us the unsettling knowledge that we will one day die. I will die. You will die.
    Why am I emphasizing this in a book about hope? Because genuine hope incorporates an unvarnished assessment of all of life’s limits, including the limits of life itself. And because we can’t understand hope without understanding our quest for purpose and meaning—a quest fueled by our awareness that one day our lives will end.
    The promise of death was made real to me when my first and best friend, Jared, died. At six years old we had been friends for a lifetime, playing cowboys, chasing after a football, and watching cartoons. My recollections of the first day he did not feel well enough to play are