"Keith Richards taught me humility. In 1981, or thereabouts, I had the opportunity to go to a Rolling Stones concert at Wembley Stadium. It was a perfect day, summer warm and lightly raining, which meant that Wembley (a soccer stadium) was a delicious mud pit. I was 17 and exuberant. I danced in the rain to all the opening bands and worked my way to the very front row in time for the appearance of Mick Jagger and Friends.

There I was, enthralled, in the front row, feet away from the toes of the great Rock’n Rollers (who were even then almost old men!) when Keith Richards looked me square in the face and winked. If I had dropped dead in that moment I couldn’t have been happier: Keith Richards, the man himself, had winked at me. I was incapable of hearing any more music I was so filled by the pleasure of our little secret.

I walked with a new confidence–Keith Richards had winked at me. By the time I reached the train back to London, I could imagine the songs he would write about me, for me. Some rude loud boisterous fans burst my reverie as we boarded the train together. This one gorgeous blonde bombshell with a piercing voice and hyenia laugh giggled raucously with her friends. Well, I thought, so what, Keith Richards winked at me. Did I mistakenly say it out loud? Because the gang was bubbling at their beautiful leader, “Did he really wink at you?”

In an instant, an ego popping crushing moment, I realized that Keith Richards winked at a lot of girls. In blushing shame I was relieved that I had had the good sense not to blurt it out, had not told anyone my imagined stature in the roving eyes of Mr. Richards.

In Rick Warren’s recently famous book, The Purpose Driven Life, he begins with a shocking 2 x 4 blow to the ego–it’s not about you he writes. I try to remind myself of this everyday–life is not winking at me in particular. It winks at everybody.

In prison events, circumstances can easily become personalized. I’ve heard elaborate conspiracy theories about every aspect of our lives from the DVD selection on the in-house channel to how the food is served. I try and imagine who in the administration exerts so much effort into carefully orchestrating frustration and disappointment in our lives. I wonder if there is an official position of Chief Thwarter who is responsible for losing critical memos, posting information too late, posting inaccurate information, answering identical questions with contradictory answers, disabling the DVD player when there’s a movie I want to watch, who makes it rain when I want to have rec and who makes sure the dining room workers forget regularly to serve parts of dinner to the first 30 women in line. It goes without saying that most prisoners are pessimistic–if I had any luck it would hurt me, they say. If something good happened I’d know it was a mistake.

I try to fight this crabby narcissistic attitude in myself by remembering that 9/10’s of the world is worse off than I. Truthfully that doesn’t help much–it’s like when you’re young and refusing to eat some ugly looking vegetable on your plate and you are told that children are starving in China, India, Africa. My response as a child was to package up the contents of the refrigerator and attempt to take it to the starving children of Africa. Whether I’m crabby and ungrateful hardly affects the fortunes of those less fortunate than I.

But here’s what I learned from Keith Richard’s wink (and was reminded of again by Rick Warren): our bloated sense of self-importance (and resultant irritation when thwarted) shrinks our lives. When it’s all about me the universe is astonishingly small. When it’s about something other than me--something beyond self--the adventure begins.

Taking things personally, getting feelings behind something, taking on feelings, are all exhausting ego circuits that resolve nothing. A humble attitude, on the other hand, makes advancement possible. For example, today at lunch the woman sitting opposite me turned to her neighbor and said, “I really want to apologize to you for that stupid thing I said.” I nearly fell off my stool. Apologies don’t come often in prison. It takes humility, a healthy well-rooted ego, to be wrong or to laugh at oneself. It takes humility to wink back at life even when it’s not about you." (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, January 18, 2007)

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. This column is one of a series, published under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'