It has taken me a long time to realize that I have an affect on the people around me. Like many people who were different when they were young, I suffered for years from shyness and a lack of self worth. All but invisible to myself, I believed I was invisible to others as well and that my presence or absence had little or no influence on anyone. In early days, I would often not respond to a written invitation or return a phone message. Sometimes I would leave a party without a word to anyone including the host or hostess. It simply never occurred to me that anyone might notice that I had not responded or that I was no longer there. That it might matter. Years later I was stunned to discover that all those years I had been seen as aloof and rude. And that my behavior often hurt people.

Many people do not know that they can strengthen or diminish the life around them. The way we live day to day simply may not reflect back to us our power to influence life or the web of relationship that connects us. Life responds to us anyway. We all have the power to affect others. We may affect those we hardly know and those we do not even know at all. Many of the people with cancer who I have met over the years have been taken completely by surprise by this power. Until they had cancer they had simply not known how many lives touched their own

Because we are connected, sometimes it is possible to affect someone's life in a major way without ever knowing you have done this. A psychologist who is now happily married once shared with me a single incident that freed her to change her life. She had been living for several years with a charming highly educated man who was physically and psychologically abusive to her. He was deeply respected in the community and to the outer world theirs was a perfect marriage. But their private life was something far different. Over and over he told her that she had provoked him and had brought the abuse on herself by her stupidity and her other shortcomings. She would try even harder but no matter how hard she tried she was never good enough. Over the years she had become so diminished and uncertain of what was real that she had come to believe him.

All this changed one day during a visit to New York City. As she and her husband were standing on a street corner waiting for the light to change, she had looked across the street and noticed a building with exceptionally beautiful architecture. She had called his attention to it. "Look John," she had said, isn't that a beautiful building." Thinking they were alone, he had responded to her in the tone of absolute contempt that he used in their private conversations. "You mean the yellow one", he said to her "the one that no one in their right mind would think was any different from every other building on the block?"

She had flushed with shame and fallen silent. And then a woman standing next to them, a complete stranger who was also waiting for the light to change, turned and fixed him with a glare. "She's absolutely right you know," she said with strong New York accent. "That is a beautiful building. And you sir, are a horse's ass." When light turned green, this woman crossed the street and walked away.

It was the defining moment in the relationship, my colleague told me. Suddenly it was all crystal clear. She knew then that she would find the strength to leave him. It would take some time but she knew she could do it.