Tag Archives: Death

What To Cut? The Urgency of a Short Life

“How did it get so late so soon?” –Dr. Seuss

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” –Charles Darwin

I was recently “invited” to a meeting at my place of work to discuss work matters with my coworkers and a superior.  The twin catches were that 1) it was not during my contracted work hours, and 2) I would not be paid to attend.  I considered it for less than a second before deciding 1) it was a waste of my time, and thus 2) I would not be going.

I knew my co-workers would be going, though, and so it got my mind stirred about my position on (not) attending the meeting and how I might defend it if challenged.  Not that anyone was going to challenge me, but I enjoy these mental exercises.  This is where my journal comes in to help me understand how I feel.  So I played it out.

First, I am a big believer in the idea that when we agree on the terms of employment, we stick to them.  I am also big on if you want me to do extra work, you give me extra money.  But I realized that neither of those principles had anything to do with my instant and fierce rejection of the invitation.  I knew it was a meeting where nothing would be achieved.  And even bigger than that, IT WAS A MEETING.

For my money, meetings are probably the single biggest time-waster in the world.  I loathe them in the core of my soul.  When I was a manager, I hosted as few of them as I possibly could for my employees.  As an employee, I attend as few of them as I possibly can.  I understand that there can be some benefit to camaraderie and team-building and such.  I think those things are important.  But most topics in most meetings all over the world are pointless and could be sent in an email that requires a few minutes to read rather than an hour of meeting time.  As for the people who hold them just to hold them or make them last the full hour just because they blocked off that much time in their calendar, I resent them with an earnest passion.

DON’T WASTE MY TIME!!!

I turned 50 this year, and though I don’t think this had anything to do with my attitude about time-wasting, I don’t rule it out.  I guess I have felt this thing in my bones most of my life, but the point on it has grown finer and finer over the years.  At this stage I might even say it is the dominant theme of my mental life.  Every proposition—how to spend the morning (or the hour, or the vacation, or the Summer), whom to pass the time with, what to talk about, what to learn about, what to create—has to be filtered through that essential prism: Is this worth my precious time?

What has become so much clearer to me in recent months than ever before in my life is this basic belief that I can only now say out loud: I don’t have much time left.

This is not a revelation of some deadly disease or anything like that.  I truly don’t have a clue when I am going to die.  It’s just my intellectual reality.  Even if I live to 100, that is simply not much time.  It seems to be flying by me like a high-speed train in recent years, and that trend does not show any signs of reversing itself.  The next 50 years, even if I were to be so lucky, will go by in a blink.  So, what if it’s only 5 more years?  Or 25?  Those are micro-blinks.  Nothing.  That’s how I am thinking these days.  I simply don’t have much time left.

You might be thinking, “That’s a horrible way to look at things.  Doesn’t that give you anxiety?   Or sadness?  Just relax and enjoy all of these years you have to go!”  I disagree.  Sure, it puts more pressure on me to be certain my priorities are clear and to make wise decisions with my schedule and the company I keep.  It can make me a bit hard on myself for poor choices.  But what it really does is keep me focused.  I know that when a situation arises in my life, it is immediately going to be run through my priority filters.  Is this going to enrich me?  Is this going to be fun?  Will I be happier or wiser for this experience?  Does it get me excited?  And possibly most critical, Is this going to keep me from something I want more?  I don’t have to mentally go down a checklist of these questions, as I have already internalized the process and just let it happen naturally.  If I had to make it into a question that required a formal answer, though, I’m guessing the question would be: Is this a good use of my time?

If it is something like that work meeting, my system is as efficient as can be.  That’s an automatic NO.  On more complex questions, I generally have an immediate feeling but then am open to persuasion, whether by me or other people.  I like to hear a good argument.  I like logic.  I also like an emotional plea.  I am sympathetic to both.  Both elements can make something a good use of my time.

I’ve had this ongoing battle in my head over the years as to what is enough in terms of what I am doing.  Again it boils down to the answers to certain types of questions: Am I helping enough people?  Am I using my gifts enough?  Have I pushed myself enough? Am I being brave enough in the face my doubts and challenges?   Am I laughing/learning/loving/adventuring enough each day (or year or decade)?  Will I be satisfied enough with my run when it is time to die?  All of the questions framing this battle again return to my use of the limited time I have to maximize my potential.  Their collective weight makes it seem completely natural to weigh every decision through the lens called Time Well-Spent???

This Summer and last Summer have had, for me, totally different vibes attached to them.  By the time last Summer began, I was mostly committed to the attempt to write my first novel.  With each passing day and each passing chapter I wrote, I became increasingly committed and excited about it.  It was doing all the things for me: enriching me, exciting me, challenging me, inspiring me, drawing out my creativity, being fun, and letting me dream of a beautiful future.  And even though it kept me from doing some other things that I love each day, I knew it was so worth it.  Quite simply, it was a good use of my time.  Not at all a waste.  This Summer has been so different.  I have not had a major personal project to drive me, no labor of love that gets me to sacrifice my other priorities.  I have been busier with other things than last Summer, but it has been just regular Life busy, errands and tasks and the like.  Necessary stuff, but nothing that I would describe as enriching, exciting, challenging, inspiring, creative, or fun.

I can only go so long without doing something that stirs up my soul before I start to question the path I am on.  I get not only restless about the capital-P Purpose of my life but also suspicious of my work ethic and focus.  I like “production” to point to as proof that I am getting somewhere.  I start to question how I will ever be satisfied with my accomplishments if I am having such a period of stagnation in my soul.  I get antsy.  This is where I have been this Summer.

As a defense mechanism against this onset of existential doom, my brain has concocted a new argument as to why I can go on with this Busy Life mode for a bit more without being overrun with guilt or submitting to a life of eternal dissatisfaction.  It goes something like this: maybe it doesn’t always have to be that I am working on that super-inspiring project that is giving me an adrenaline jolt and meaning to my life—those projects will ebb and flow naturally as I stay vigilant-but-open to them–but it DOES always have to be that I am not including things in my schedule that feel in my heart and mind like a waste of time.   It’s not always going to be writing a book or painting a masterpiece, but it can’t be sitting in a pointless meeting.  Obviously this explanation requires a little psychological tapdancing in order to convince my ambitious, “true” self that the Busy Life things I am doing are necessary for bigger priorities—like a happy family—rather than actual time-wasters cleverly disguised to allow me to be lazy.

It seems to be a matter of constantly being honest with myself about whether I am being disciplined enough with the projects that stir my soul and keep wind in my sails, balanced with some grace to allow for periods when Life just doesn’t allow much time for all of that.  I can’t be constantly chiding myself for not doing enough to advance my dreams.  That’s not healthy. On the other hand, I refuse to waste time.

Thus, it becomes: Which things can I cut from regular Life?  The meetings are the obvious answer.  But then it gets tougher.  There are not hard and fast answers.  General guidelines might be better.  Most gatherings I find wasteful—too much small-talk and nonsense, not enough true connections and passion shared—but certainly not all.  Limiting television and social media seems wise, but I don’t want to eliminate either completely.  I would like to figure out a way to spend less time driving.  Perhaps a work-from-home job would make me feel more productive.  I’m sure there are others.  I just have to be present and hyper-aware of the value of everything on my itinerary as I pass through the day so that when I come across a waste, I make the mental note and skip that the next time.

Because there aren’t so many next times left.  I keep going back to that again and again in my mind: I don’t have many Summers left.  Even if I could talk to my 20-year-old self right now, I would tell him, “You don’t have many Summers left, kid.  Don’t waste a single one.”  Autumns, Winters, or Springs, either.  They just go so fast.  The value of each one gets higher with every passing year, because there are that many fewer to go, no matter how long your lifeline is.  It’s not getting longer, only shorter.  What’s the line? “We’ve been dying since the day we were born.”  Something like that.  I don’t really like to think of it as we are dying so much as that we have less and less time to live.  I am here to LIVE!  All the way to the end and not just once in a while.  It’s time to be efficient with it all.  I better get busy living.

How about you?  How much of your time feels wasted?  Open up your journal and take a walk through your schedule and what your actions say about your current priorities.  Is your life full of activities and people that are in line with who you want to be and how you want to be spending your fleeting years?  Are you working toward something that, even if you aren’t exactly doing it now, you know that this path you are on is a positive use of your precious time?  When I am driving my kids around, I remind myself that even though it looks boring and so time-consuming, this is valuable and very important to me because of the commitment I made to being the best, most present parent I can be and raising them well.  What are the things in your life that look trivial and wasteful but are actually in the service of your highest priorities?  What are your habits or items in your regular schedule of activities that look most obviously like excellent uses of your time?  Which priorities do they satisfy?  Are there any of your “buckets” or priorities that simply do not get attention on your calendar?  Why is that?  What things on your schedule could stand to be removed and replaced by things that would better match what you believe your priorities to be?  Would you go so far as to say these possibilities for removal are time-wasters?  What kinds of things—meetings, social media, bad company, etc.—make you think, “Well, I will never get that hour back.”  Are you ever bored?  Would you say boredom is a sign that you are wasting your time?  Is it easy or hard for you to admit when you are wasting your time?  Do you get antsy like I do when you haven’t “accomplished” or “produced” anything in a while?  If so, does that pent-up feeling cause a reckoning like this one in which you re-examine your time and kick yourself in the butt to get going on something more productive?  When I say to you, whether you are 25 or 85, “You don’t have much time left,” how does that strike you?  Are you more inclined to defend and be like, “Oh, sure I do.  I’ll be around for a long time.”?  Or are you more like, “Holy crap!  You’re right.  It’s getting away in a hurry.”?  Do you feel like they are both true, or is only one true and the others are either delusional or pessimistic?  Do you always answer the same way, or do you go back and forth depending on the season of your life?  At the moment, are you content coasting along under the assumption that you have loads of time left, or do you perhaps need a little jolt of urgency about the length of your stay here and what you ought to be doing about that?  Leave me a reply and let me know: How could you better spend your numbered days?

Choose wisely,

William

P.S. If this topic resonates with you today, please share it with your community.  Let’s help each other to clarify our position on the timeline.

P.P.S. If this type of introspection appeals to you, consider buying my book Journal Of YOU: Uncovering The Beauty That Is Your Truth at your favorite online retailers.  Namaste.

Have You Come To Terms With Your Age?

“It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.” –Andy Rooney

“How did it get so late so soon?” –Dr. Seuss

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” –Charles Darwin

Hello friend,

I just turned 50.  I am embarrassed to admit that it was hard for me to type that sentence.  I am still not quite there yet.  Fifty sounds OLD!  Whether it is or isn’t, I will leave that for you to debate.  It still sounds that way to me.  And I guess I am not yet at that place of acceptance or surrender or whatever you want to call it that will have me agreeing that I am OLD.  Because if I agree, what does it say about what I have left in me?  Not much time, and even less vigor to do what I need to do it with.  I need some time to sit with that one.  Sadly (or ironically or something), time is the one thing in short supply here.  It is tough turning 50!

I started processing 50 the moment I turned 49.  It was the first time I could no longer deny it.  At 48, I could still convince myself I was in my mid-forties.  Sure, it was a stretch, but I was in the mood for a stretch at that point.  When 49 came around, though, that was it.  I started telling myself I was already 50 just to get used to the idea.  I guess I wanted to soften the blow, to normalize the whole concept of being in my fifties.  I said it over and over.  I could tell it wasn’t really sinking in, though.

I blame my grandparents and my great-uncles and great-aunts.  My Mom’s parents, as was common back then, married in their early twenties and started having kids.  My Grandma had two sisters, and the three of them and their husbands were the best of friends and hung out together–though they called it “visiting,” which makes me smile now to remember, as they are all gone from this world except for these beautiful memories–as often as they could.  They were all great to us kids, and I loved them.  But they were definitely OLD to me.  They had things like false teeth and canes and pipes—genuine Old People stuff.  But they were in their fifties!  At least when I got to know them they were.  I’m sure they had jobs and mowed their yards and built stuff.  You know, regular adult activities, not senile, nursing home activities.  None of that registered to me, though.  They were OLD.  Period.  End of story.  I think that first impression of fifty-somethings being OLD really stuck.  I didn’t expect to ever get that old, but if I were to get there, then surely I would be OLD, too.  It’s logical.

Well, here I am.  Fifty-something.

Getting over the sound of it is one thing.  That will take its own time.  And hey, that’s the silly, unimportant part of this process.  The much more salient part for me is to figure out what being 50 years into my life means.  In essence, it puts the spotlight on the question: Where am I in my lifetime, and what does that mean I have left? 

Over the past year of processing this, I have probably approached it in almost every possible way.  At different points I have decided I am right where I need to be and also nowhere close to what I should have done; feeling great for my age and feeling like a rickety dinosaur; believing I have special things still to create and lamenting that I don’t have time to create them; and just about every other dichotomy you could dream up.  And I’ve not just ridden the extremes.  I have also slid subtly along the spectrum of any imaginable scale of optimism, despair, or acceptance.  Basically, I’ve learned it’s going to be a weird and complicated psychological ride on the way toward making any semblance of peace with my age from this point forward.  Ambivalence will be my constant companion.  That’s unsettling to me.  But whoever said this stuff was easy?

Although I have tested out every mindset and approach to turning 50, the one that seems to be settling in now that I am actually here is the sense of urgency to do the things now.  All of them.  As soon as possible.  It is an overwhelming sense of “I’m running out of time!”  I keep wondering: How many years do I have left?  And to put a finer point on it since I both work in education and naturally adore Summer, it usually comes down to this: How many Summers do I have left? 

This Summer I spent working hard to complete the first draft of my next book.  It felt amazing but also highly pressing.  I was keenly aware every day that Summer was short and I had to take advantage.  That is a microcosm of how I am feeling about what remains of my life at this stage: there isn’t much left and I better use every bit of it wisely.

I’m guessing there are lots of people out there who would look at it completely differently.  Like, “Hey, I’m only 50.  The average life expectancy is around 79.  I’ve got a solid three decades to go.  That’s plenty of time for accomplishment, adventure, and a relaxing retirement.  What’s the rush?”  I can see that point-of-view.  I get it.  It just isn’t me.

For one, I simply never pictured a very long life for myself.  I hope I have lots of healthy, happy, and productive years ahead of me, but the vision doesn’t come naturally.  The other thing is, during the process of writing this letter, one of my best friends from childhood died.  Forty-nine years old and gone.  He didn’t even make the 50 that I am bellyaching about!  In the midst of my grieving these last few days, a thought has occasionally slipped free of the fog in my mind: There are no guaranteed days left.  It could end any time. 

Of course that is true every day since your arrival on Earth, but it never feels true when you are young, right?  Today, though, when I am thinking about my friend’s kids who no longer have their Dad and his wife who no longer has her husband, it feels very, very true.  Life is so darn short.  And whether I make it to 51 or 81, I am well beyond the halfway mark now and the end will be here before I am ready for it.  That clarity is enough to make me feel older than I want to be.

The bottom line is that turning 50 has ramped up my urgency to be the person I feel I was born to be and to do the things that make me feel joy, fulfillment, and sure that my presence here was a net-positive for the world, especially for the people whose lives I have touched.  This sense of urgency and responsibility is something I imagine will only increase as I age, especially as I monitor and recognize my continued failure to reach the standards I have set for myself.  I simply must rise to the occasion that is this beautiful Life.  I will start immediately, because I have A LOT to do!

How about you?  Have you made peace with your age and where you are in the cycle of Life?  Open up your journal and sort yourself out in its pages.  How old are you?  When you say it, what feelings does it bring up?  Do you cringe, even just slightly?  How old do you feel in your mind?  Do you fancy yourself much more young and carefree than you actually are?  What percentage of people do you think actually feel OLD inside?  How does your physical health affect your perception of your age?  How does the way your body feels compare to the way your mind feels?  Do you imagine that gap will only get wider with age, or how do you see your disparity changing?  How much does age matter to you?  Is it something you think about often?  Does it stress you out at all?  Do you dread your milestone birthdays that announce to the world that you are in the next decade?  Has your view on which age is actually OLD changed as you have aged?  At this point, what is the age when you start thinking of people as OLD?  Are you included in that group?  If so, does that bother you, or have you come to terms with it?  If you are not yet what you consider to be OLD, how do you think you will handle your arrival there?  At your age, what is your best guess about how much longer you will be around?  With that number in mind, how urgent is the need to get going on things you plan to accomplish before you go?  What are the things you have left to do in order to look back with a sense of fulfillment and peace about your time here?  Which is the most pressing?  What is one small step you can take today to move forward on that goal?  I hope you take that step.  Leave me a reply and let me know: Have you come to terms with your age?

Wishing you the most beautiful life,

William

P.S. It today’s letter resonated with you, please share it with your community.  Our awareness of our own journey improves the intertwining journeys of everyone around us.

P.P.S. If this type of self-reflection for the purpose of growth is appealing to you, consider buying my book Journal Of YOU: Uncovering The Beauty That Is Your Truth at your favorite online retailers.  Namaste.

What Always Brings Tears To Your Eyes?

“Those who do not weep, do not see.” –Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Tears are words that need to be written.” –Paulo Coelho

Hello friend,

Last weekend I attended my first virtual funeral.  I don’t ever go to real funerals.  It is just not my jam, for many reasons.  However, this one had me especially intrigued, and since it was over Zoom, I figured that I could escape whenever I wanted.  My commitment was minimal.  I was drawn to this particular memorial not because I was so close with the deceased—indeed, we didn’t know each other well at all and hadn’t seen each other in years—but because of my sense of who he was (perhaps a kindred spirit) and the wide variety of lives I imagined that he had touched in his too-brief stay on this Earth.   I knew that he was special, and I wanted to see how that presented itself in this final farewell.  And honestly, I wanted a little more of him.  I am sure we all did.

Throughout the service, which was designed to pack in as many different voices and testimonials as possible from the lives he touched along the way, I discovered a pattern in my emotional state: when the speaker was dry-eyed, I was dry-eyed; when the speaker cried, I cried.  It never failed.  Oh sure, I cried at a few other times, too, like when they showed a picture of him and my daughter when she was a baby or a picture of him and my wife smiling together.  Those got me.  But otherwise, it was a pretty safe bet that when I witnessed weeping, I wept.

I have come to know that pattern about myself over the years.  When raw emotion is in front of me—especially crying but beyond that as well, even in Joy—I am an instant puddle.  After studying myself through my journals for this long, I have come to chalk this characteristic up to the same Empathy that has shaped so much of my worldview, including my politics and spirituality.  When I witness someone deep in feeling, it just seems to channel directly into my heart.  I am powerfully moved in an instant.  It can be a problem, but I mostly appreciate it.  I like to be reminded occasionally that I have not hardened myself too much against this world that is so full of slings and arrows.  I am still raw and affected.  That is alright with me, especially the part of me that wants to remain an artist and a warrior for justice until the day I die.  As long as I keep having authentic interactions with people and absorbing their genuine emotions, I am going to be a weeper.

But when else?  Other than diving headlong into others’ drama, what are the other moments that get my tears going?

If you have been with Journal of You for a while—whether through these regular letters or just the book—you know that I spend a fair amount of time obsessing about Death and Legacy, the importance of my impact and what I will leave behind.  I am so grateful that I have not yet had to face many deaths of those closest to me; I have always been lucky in that department.  But it doesn’t stop my active imagination from running wild with images of that loss.  I don’t mean scenes of graphic violence or horrific accidents; my mind does not go there.  It does, however, go often to thoughts of learning of their loss or having the difficult conversations about life without them.  I picture things like hearing about my child’s (or sister’s or mother’s) death or explaining my wife’s death to my children.  Vivid scenes that sweep me away and leave me tear-stained.

Those daydreams, however, are nothing compared to the ones in which I am the one dying  (usually of cancer) and have to communicate that with my wife and, even more often, my kids.  Somehow, I seem to fall into this awful habit when I am driving alone.  I think about making videos for them to watch when I am gone, on occasions like birthdays, graduations, or weddings, messages from their father who would be so proud of them and wish he were there.  I make big speeches, often out loud in my car, by the end of which I am full-on sobbing, hardly able to see the road through my gushing eyes.  By the time I realize what I am doing, I am practically panting in despair.  It is embarrassing.  It is that idea of leaving my family, though, that I simply cannot abide.  That is a guaranteed tear-jerker.

Speaking of leaving my family, I am pretty quick to get weepy in saying goodbye to my parents and siblings after our too-infrequent visits.  I try to fight it by rushing through the process, but by the time I hit the gas pedal to drive away, I am mush.  Even though we all get frustrated with my Dad for doing it, sometimes I envy him for his habit of just sneaking off before the goodbye part of the visits.  If we have gone to his house to stay for a holiday, he always manages to be “at work” when it comes time for us to leave town.  If we meet up with him at the cabin and we are all planning to leave the same day, he gets up early and gets on the road before anyone realizes it is time to go.  It’s pretty weasel-y, but at least he doesn’t have to face the emotion of goodbye.  He leaves that for the rest of us, most of whom are pretty teary about it.  I don’t really get that way with goodbyes with other people outside the family, but that is why family is family.  It’s just deeper.  I know I will be awful about it when my kids are grown.

I have a terrible time reading out loud, too, without crying.  This happens with sad stories, of course.  I still read to my daughter every night before bed, and it is highlight of my day, but I occasionally struggle to keep it together.  I can laugh now at my attempts a few years ago to get through Where The Red Fern Grows with her, but it was a choking, teary mess at the time.  Any sentimental message read aloud can get me, though, like a card or a Facebook post that I am sharing with my wife.  It happens with my own writing, too, especially things about my feelings for loved ones.  I sometimes read my work aloud to myself before publishing it, just to see if it flows, and I have definitely found myself in a puddle of tears on more than one occasion.

Likewise, I can envision wanting to say something at my parents’ funerals but just not being able to.  I am one of those criers who simply cannot speak through the process.  The emotion stabs me like a knife, and it’s like my air is just gone.  I tried to say a few words about my grandfather during the visitation the night before his funeral, and it was a sobby, chokey, mostly silent mess.

Strangely, I have occasionally fancied the idea of being a television news reporter or anchor, probably a poor fit for a guy who cries when sharing almost any impactful story.  It was more acceptable when I was studying to be an actor, which, now that I think of it, is probably how I fell into the habit of imagining all of those dramatic scenes I mentioned above that so regularly slay me in the car.  I guess I am drawn to sharing the Truth of any situation—whether my own or of those whose stories need hearing—even if that sharing brings me to tears.

As I come to recognize that realization, I am reminded of my tendency to tear up—not sob, but just get “watery eyes”—in just about any direct, intimate conversation (typically one-on-one).  I can recall so many conversations, especially ones concerning my loved ones or my own work—things like parent-teacher conferences and job interviews—when the eye-to-eye and the intimacy itself seems to draw the water involuntarily up to my eyes, even when seemingly inappropriate.  As I said, it is not weeping in the usual sense—I am not breaking down emotionally in these otherwise-normal moments, just tearing up a bit (which can cause the normal to become slightly awkward, though people typically pretend not to notice).  I chalk it up to sensitivity.  I am a bit of a raw nerve, prone to really feel everything.  It is just one of my idiosyncrasies.  I roll with it.

I am not sure what it says about me, the things that bring me to tears and the regularity of them in my life.  I tend to not judge it, not seeing it as either a particular strength or weakness.  But is it?  I kind of appreciate the cleansing nature of crying, but I don’t seek out opportunities for it (like I said, the dramatic driving scenes are not planned or even fully conscious, but rather just the result of getting swept up by my overactive imagination).  I don’t have a strong desire to cry any more than I do now, though I would prefer not to have so much of the “watery eyes” in mundane, everyday conversations.  I tend to see the source of my tears as an understanding of Love and the value of connection.

I also understand that I come at this topic as someone who is unusually blessed in my life circumstances and psychological make-up.  I have been lucky all my life, with a healthy upbringing, a pleasant nuclear and extended family, always enough food on the table, with things I enjoy doing and people I enjoy spending time with (and, as I mentioned, I haven’t dealt with much death yet).  My worldview is naturally optimistic, and I don’t struggle with anxiety or depression.  I am resilient and self-confident, and I understand, thanks to my daily journaling, the minute details of what makes me tick.  My mental health is in good shape.  For all of these things, I am extremely lucky.  I understand that if any one of them went the other way, my outlook on this topic of crying would likely be entirely different.  I am grateful that most of my tears to this point have been healthy ones and from situations I could choose.  I don’t ever cry because the world all seems too much for me, because I am stressed out or just can’t take one more thing working against me.  I don’t cry because I hate my life or feel trapped or overburdened.  I imagine those kinds of tears are pretty common in the world, and I know that Life still has many challenges remaining for me.  A run of good luck doesn’t last forever.

This is part of why this topic is fascinating to me, and why I want to know your answer.  It illustrates yet another way in which our stories are all different and thus why we need Empathy and Grace.  Our tears, whether of Joy or Sadness or anything in between, reveal something special about us.  No, reveal is the wrong word.  Maybe indicate.  The tears don’t tell the story.  They merely indicate that there is something special worth digging into.  Something deeper.  Something worth the effort to understand and appreciate, because it is soul-level stuff, the kind that makes us who we are.  For me, that means there is magic in those tears.   The magic of our Truth.  And I always, always, want to be a part of the Truth.

How about you?  What always makes you cry?  Open up your journal and your heart to explore the source and significance of those tears.  What predictably makes you cry?  Are your things specific events (e.g. a funeral, a break-up, a goodbye) or mental health-triggered issues (e.g. anxiety, depression, or the accumulation of Life just becoming too much sometimes)?  What are the events that trigger you?  Are they obviously heavy hitters, like death, or are they more subtle things?  Who are the people usually associated with your tears?  Has it been the same people all your life?  How often are the these “people tears” due to how much you love them, and how often are they due to these people wronging you?  Is that a healthy ratio?  How do you do with goodbyes?  What about books and movies (I’m a big movie crier)?  Do you have any memories that always bring tears with them?  Are those good memories or bad ones?  How often do you cry tears of Joy?  What other emotions make you cry?  How often do ordinary, everyday life situations bring tears to your eyes?  What kinds of conversations do it?  Do you cry at the sight of others crying or suffering?  How empathetic are you?  Do you think your Empathy rating dictates how much you cry in response to others’ pain?  Do you ever wonder about the source of your tears, their true trigger?  What do your tears actually say about what is going on deep down inside you?  Are they revealing of something you haven’t yet addressed and need to dig into?  Do you need help with that?  Do you believe your crying to be mostly a healthy sign, or a sign of problems?  Do you usually feel better afterward?  Do you wish you cried more often or less often?  Which topics give you your best cries?  Leave me a reply and let me know: What always brings tears to your eyes?

Be free,

William

P.S. If today’s topic resonated with you, please share it.  We could all use a release from time to time.

P.P.S. If this way of introspection appeals to you, consider buying my book, Journal of YOU: Uncovering The Beauty That Is Your Truth, at your favorite online retailers.

So Much Left Undone: The Tragedy of Life Cut Short

“Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.” –George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you’re dead, it’s gone. Over. You’ve made what you’ve made. Dreamed your dream. Written your name.” –Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book 

“You must decide if you are going to rob the world or bless it with the rich, valuable, potent, untapped resources locked away within you.” –Myles Munroe, Understanding Your Potential–Discovering the Hidden You

Hello friend,

I was at an arcade/sports bar for a kid’s birthday party when I heard the news of Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash. I looked up at the bank of TV screens above the bar and there was his picture and the dates of his birth and death. I was stunned. I shook my head, recalling that I had just that morning read an article that mentioned him congratulating LeBron James on passing Kobe on the NBA’s all-time scoring list the night before. And now he was dead, just like that. It was a shock.

But the real pain for me came later in the day, when I learned that his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, or “Gigi,” was also on the flight and killed. My heartache only grew when, in the following days, I learned that among the seven others who died in the crash were two of Gigi’s basketball teammates, Alyssa Altobelli and Payton Chester. Kids. Kids whose brilliance was snuffed out in an instant and whose future contributions to this world we will never get to experience and appreciate. As iconic and mythical as Kobe Bryant was to millions of people across the world, it is the deaths of those girls that I can’t seem to shake free of. Even two weeks later, they hang like a cloud over my heart.

My daughter, India, is 11 years old right now, just two years younger than Gigi and her teammates. She is probably both the kindest and the smartest person I know. Her compassion knows no bounds, and she is always looking for ways to help people and make the world a better place. She is clearly on the path to greatness in one form or another (and knowing her, probably many forms). Her existence on the planet, when all is said and done, will surely be a net-positive. I cannot imagine the loss to the world–never mind my personal loss–if she were to die at the age 13. Oh, the wonder and brilliance that we would all miss out on! A loss so big that only those who already knew her could fathom because she had not yet been fully unleashed by the gift of maturity to do her special thing for us all.

So much potential. So many possibilities. So much still on the table. So much left undone. It is devastating to consider.

That is what I think about with Gigi, Payton, and Alyssa. What magnificence were they going to offer us? How were they going to illuminate our world with their gifts? Was Gigi really going to be a basketball savant like her father, as video suggests, and become the next icon of the sport? Would they become teachers, artists, scientists, or senators? Would they raise wonderful children? Would they raise our awareness? Would they break down barriers? What did they leave on the table??? To depart from us at that age, leaving us grasping fruitlessly to “We’ll never know…” as an answer, is truly devastating. It is the essence of tragedy.

But as I think about that condition, I begin to wonder: At what age is it NOT tragic? Seriously. What is the point when we can be satisfied that someone has emptied their bucket and given the world a satisfactory portion of their potential?

I look no further than Kobe Bryant himself. While I was never a big fan of his as a sports hero–though I had great respect for his work ethic and competitive will, I was turned off by other parts of him and more drawn to other athletes–I had, in the few short years since his retirement, become fascinated with his curiosity and his intellect, as well as his ambition for projects beyond basketball. I had known already that he was fluent in multiple languages, a trait which I respect. But he had also become a true storyteller, creating a series of books and even winning an Oscar for a short film he wrote, produced, and narrated called Dear Basketball. He seemed to want to keep expanding and sharing his light in as many ways as possible, including coaching his daughter’s basketball team. So, even though he had a very long, full career as a pro athlete, inspired millions of people around the globe, made a fortune, and had four kids and multiple successful business ventures–more than most of us dare dream of–I would say he had an unfinished life. At 41, it appeared he had a lot more to give. That is tragic to me.

It’s different, of course, than the loss of the three children. He got to live out his dream, at least. But still, with all of his potential–a bright, curious mind with burning ambition and the money to fuel it–he clearly left a lot on the table. We’ll never know…

It saddens me to see potential go unfulfilled.

This heaviness I have been carrying around with the losses of these young people and all that they might have been has inevitably led to thoughts of my own life and death. Beyond those awful visions of losing my children at this age and the world being deprived of all their potential magic, I have pondered my own death and the relative importance of what I would leave undone if I should go now, at 47. How much more do I have in me, and how valuable is that to the world? Can I still be a net-positive? At bottom, I suppose the question is this: How much of a tragedy would my death right now be?

My mind goes immediately to my kids and the thing I believe I have done best in my life: parenting them. They are only 11 and 9 now, so no matter how solid the foundation has been laid to this point, I still have a job to do. So many lessons to teach, meals to prepare, and hugs to give. Is there any age before adulthood when kids DON’T need all of the material and emotional support that a parent provides? There is just so much more I am going to do with them and for them? With them, I feel like an unqualified Good. It is the one spot in the world where I feel essential.

While I am less confident of my necessity in my wife’s life–she would be and do Amazing under just about any circumstances–I hope that my partnership with her can help her to rise even higher, do even more great deeds, and leave an ever-increasing impact on the world. I like to think that the supporting role I play in our duo allows the light to keep reaching her so she can amplify it and spread it out into her many areas of influence.

I hope I have some good writing ahead of me that will enrich the lives of my readers and those around them. I want to think that these letters to you continue to provide you with fodder for self-reflection and journaling that will lead you, like it lead me, to a greater self-knowledge and, in turn, a deeper sense of gratitude and thus happiness. I believe in the value of my purpose and my message, and I believe I have more to share on that front. I hope that includes more books and many more letters.

I know that I have more works of service in me as well, and also just more positive interpersonal communications. I plan to be a better human: more kind, more generous, more forgiving, more compassionate. And hey, I plan to have even more fun and adventure, making myself even more grateful and happy, which I know seems selfish on the surface, but I truly believe that happier people are a benefit to the world.

All in all, though I may not reach the millions that Kobe Bryant reached, I think I can be a net-positive to this place if Fate allows me to stick around. But especially for my kids. They are going to do magic here, and I need to help facilitate that. That is what saddens me so much about Gigi Bryant, Alyssa Altobelli, and Payton Chester. They were going to do magic here, too. I hope that any extra years I am granted here can be filled with such works of Good that I can make up for some bit of what we lost with them. I hope my life can do honor to theirs. And in the end, when it is my turn to go, I hope that I have wrung so much out of the years I was granted that it seems no tragedy at all that I have gone.

How about you? When you arrive at the end of your life, how much will you leave on the table? Open your journal and consider both your realized and unrealized potential. How have you done so far in your lifetime? Have you used your talents wisely and generously? Have you been of service to others? Do you feel confident that your existence has been a net-positive, that the world is better because you were here? Whether or not that is true, what would be the loss to the world if you were to die today? What more do you have left to give? In what specific areas of your life do you plan to be the most valuable? Family? Career? Volunteering? Sharing your voice? General personal kindness? Which people in your sphere of influence would miss out the most if you were to die now? How aware are they of that? Based on the life you have lived so far, could we make a pretty good guess as to what you have left to contribute, or do you plan to surprise us? How steeply can you raise your trajectory? Does the possibility excite you? How will your legacy differ if you live 20 more years from the legacy you would leave today? At what point in your journey–past, present, or future–would your loss be deemed a tragedy for the world (I mean beyond just being very sad for your loved ones, which is a given)? Do you mourn people differently depending upon how old they are when they die? If you had to pick an age when it no longer feels so tragic when someone dies, what is that number? 60? 78 (average life expectancy)? 90? Do you mourn people differently based on their talents and what they might have left to give, regardless of age? In the case of the helicopter crash involving Kobe Bryant, which did you find yourself mourning more: the 41-year-old, multi-talented celebrity or the 13-year-old kids? What do you imagine each of them left undone? Do the deaths of strangers shake you and stay with you? Is it because of their potential and what they never got to do? How about thoughts of your own “early” death? Do they rattle you? Is it because of what you might never do? Does that motivate you do better now so as to have fewer regrets about your impact and achievements? If you died now, what would you most lament having not done? How devastating is that thought? Leave me a reply and let me know: How tragic would it be if you were to die today?

Carpe diem,

William

P.S. If this resonated with you, please share it with your community. Let’s all live our best lives now!

P.P.S. If this way of reflecting on your life feels important to you, consider purchasing my book Journal of YOU: Uncovering The Beauty That Is Your Truth at your favorite online retailers.

How Valuable Is Your TIME?

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” –Seneca, On The Shortness Of Life

“No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favor. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.” –Seneca, On The Shortness Of Life

Hello friend,

I think I have finally reached the point in life when I understand that the worst thing you can do to me is take away my time. I see now that it was always true but that I just didn’t realize it. I was running around in denial or confusion, I suppose, never minding too much if you dragged me along somewhere on your agenda or if my time with you did not inspire or engage me. I was not much offended by that. I went along. “What else do I have to do?” I passed the time. I wasted it. I spent it. But I didn’t really use the time. I didn’t make the most of it. And I didn’t realize what a tragedy that was, what an abomination. I realize it now.

I don’t know when it started for me. I know I was acting on my repulsion to time-wasting before I was aware of it. Somehow my soul knew. It sent the signal to my body. I would get antsy and irritable.

I once worked as a low-end manager for a large corporation. It was part of my boss’s duties–as assigned by his boss and the boss above him–to have a weekly one-on-one meeting with each of the managers who worked under him. I should probably mention that I have never known a mentally lazier, less invested or engaged person in my life; the one and only reason he held his job was because of who he knew above him in the chain of command. It was like a character out of a farfetched movie. Anyway, in addition to the weekly management team meeting, he and I had our one-on-one meeting in his office. I would enter and sit in the chair in front of his desk with a pen and a notebook open just in case anything important came up (spoiler: it never did). He would say hello from his desk and then swivel in his chair and sit with his large back to me and look at his computer for several minutes as if he were engrossed in some deep reading and I were not even in the room. Then he might come out of his reverie and say something like, “Uh, I guess your numbers are looking pretty good again this month…” and then drift back into remote silence. (As I said, it was like a movie scene.) He would do that a few times over the course of a half-hour, then finally swivel back around and say, “Okay, buddy, you got anything for me?” By that point, even if I did have an issue that I could use some executive assistance with, I was too exasperated with the time I had just spent doodling on my note pad and looking at his large back that I was ready with a quick “NOPE!” and a sprint to the door. Beyond just the disbelief that this type of person could exist and be well-paid for his time, I always left that room thinking, “With all that I have to accomplish in my jam-packed twelve-hour work day, that part did no one any good.” That was when I also grew accustomed to the thought, “Well, that’s 30 minutes I will never get back!” I came to hate that idea.

I think my experiences in the wasteland of unnecessary–and unnecessarily long–corporate meetings probably ushered me directly into the next phase of my working life, when I downgraded my responsibilities and time commitments so I could be efficient when I was there, have hardly any meetings, and get out of there to do the things with the people (my wife and kids) that made every moment feel sacred and priceless. I didn’t care that I had to give up money and prestige to do it. I just wanted my moments to count.

It is from this vein that sprung my efforts to be the best and most present father I could be. That vein is also the source of this entire Journal of You experience, including a book and more than five years worth of letters to you. I want to make the moments–even the “spare” ones–meaningful to me and impactful to everyone whose lives I touch.

I see this sensitivity to time all over my life now. I have become highly averse to traffic and other unnecessary time spent in the car. I avoid most errands like The Plague, unless I can string them together into one trip. I chose a job that was about four minutes from my house and feel like I hit the logistical jackpot with how it fits into my children’s schedules (and I have almost no meetings!). I had a follow-up appointment after a surgery that ended up being basically a “How are you?” kind of deal that I could have handled with a one-minute phone call, and I was at least as annoyed with them for wasting my time to go there as I was for the crazy money they charged me for it.

As I write this and perform this scan of my life both past and present, it becomes so much more clear as to why I have always hated small-talk. I always thought it had only to do with a lack of depth and true connection, just making noise to pass the time–like watching television–and keeping everyone (except me) comfortable/unchallenged by keeping it all superficial. Because that alone would be enough to make my skin crawl. But I see now that the previously undiscovered part of my frustration with the small-talk experience that characterizes most interactions in this society is the time-wasting aspect. I think of all the times I have finished a conversation and thought to myself, “Well, that was a complete waste of time! Neither of us know each other any better now than we did five minutes ago. What a missed opportunity!” It is like death by a million cuts, all of these conversations that eat up the days and years of our rapidly-dwindling lifetimes. I have donated enough blood to that cause. I don’t want to die that way anymore.

I feel like I need to set up some sort of fence or filter through which every request upon my time must pass to make it onto my docket. That filter is probably just a simple question or two, maybe something like Does this make my life feel bigger? or Does this resonate with the Me I am trying to become? I imagine that keeping only the engagements and the people who can pass that kind of test would leave me feeling much less buyer’s remorse for the way I have spent my time.

I just want everything I do to feel like it is worth it. The people I hangout with. The work I choose. The media that I consume. The curiosities and passions that I pursue. The meetings I take. The conversations that I join. The causes that I take up. I want every last bit of it to feel like it was worth the investment of the most precious resource I have: time. From here on out, I will guard it with my life.

How about you? How ferociously do you protect your limited time? Open up your journal and consider the ways you pass your days. What are the things in your life that feel most like a waste of your time? Do you have hobbies–e.g. watching TV, Facebook, YouTube, drug or alcohol use, video games, etc.–that eat up large portions of time but don’t make you feel any better? Why do you continue to give them your energy? How about the people who aren’t worth your time or energy but still receive your attention? What is it about these people? Is it logistically impossible to remove them from your life? If so, how could you make your interactions with them more valuable? Are you too afraid to have the uncomfortable conversation that could help them rise or remove them from your life? Is that conversation more uncomfortable than keeping them in your life and dragging you down? Are there certain places that always leave you wishing you had never gone there? Can you stop? Are you aware of the things that waste your time as you are doing them, or is it only in hindsight that the recognition comes to you? How much of your job/work life ends up feeling like a waste of your time, and how much feels very productive and worthwhile? How much do you drag things out at work just to fill in your required hours? If it were left entirely up to you, could you streamline your workplace and significantly shorten everyone’s work week while maintaining productivity? What are the very best ways that you regularly use your time? Is it in communion with certain people? What makes the time with those particular people so valuable? How can you get more time with them or people like them? How about your best activities? What about that activity time distinguishes it? Is it the mere doing of the activity–e.g. I love the feeling of hitting a tennis ball–or is it the things that come along with the activity (the exercise, the camaraderie, the connection with Nature, etc.)? How can you work more of that activity into your schedule? Is there a different activity that you have been wanting to try that you sense would also be worth your investment? Is there some place that always nourishes you and makes you glad you went there? Can you get there more often or find those same feelings elsewhere? Better yet, can you bring its qualities to you? What would your life look like if it were filled with only things that felt like a good use of your time? Starkly different than your current life, or only subtly so? How close could you reasonably get to that ideal version? What would you choose as a filter question(s) to help you make better decisions about who and what to allow into your life and your schedule? Would that be enough? Can you begin to use that filter immediately? What is holding you back? On a scale of 1 to 10, how selective/picky are you about what you allow onto your docket? Does all of this really boil down to a question of your own self-worth, i.e. is this about believing that you are worthy of only things that lift you up and speak to your soul? Are you worthy (Hint: YES!!!!!)? Leave me a reply and let me know: How valuable is your time?

You are so worth it,

William

P.S. If this resonated with you, please share it with loved ones or your social media network. It is a profoundly important topic with an answer whose deadline is pressing.

P.P.S. If you enjoy the challenge of questioning yourself and examining your life, check out my book Journal of YOU: Uncovering The Beauty That Is Your Truth at your favorite online retailers.

Beyond the Limits of Empathy: A Pain Too Great To Comprehend

“I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him… The land of tears is so mysterious.” –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.” J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Hello friend,

I have had a double whammy of friends in anguish lately. There are moments that their pains weigh so heavily on my heart that it seems I can hardly stand it.

The first came last week when I was sitting outside in the cold watching my son’s track practice with his good buddy’s mom, a dynamic, beautiful-hearted woman who has become my friend this year. As we sat shivering in our respective blankets, she shared with me that she was quite sure that her cancer–that I knew had been a recurring nightmare in her life over the course of several years–had just made a comeback. She had recently felt the physical changes that were its telltale signs and was waiting for her upcoming appointments and the scans that would make it official and thereby commence the fight for her life (again).

The news flattened me. The more it sank in, the more deflated I became. I tried to imagine the heartbreaking scenarios that must have been thrashing around nonstop in her mind as she waited: the empty helplessness of leaving her two young boys without a Mom, the guilt of leaving her husband alone to do the work they dreamed of doing only together, the milestones, and the million ordinary, extraordinary moments that come with loving your people wholeheartedly. I couldn’t bear these thoughts even in my imagination, so it baffled me how she could even be functioning with those cards in her hand.

After being enveloped the rest of the week in the cloud of her situation and prospects, ruminating every day in my journal on how she could handle it, I was hit with a second blast via a Facebook post. One of my oldest friends had lost his vivacious younger brother suddenly. At the age of 42, he was simply ripped from his joyous life and from his close-knit family.

My heart burst for them, especially my old friend. I just wanted to wrap my arms around him and absorb some of his anguish, to lighten his new life sentence in Grief. I felt like I had been kicked in the gut, imagining the wrenching pain and unanswered questions left by such a loss, amplified by its suddenness and his relative youth. How does one go on in the face of something that feels so wrong, so unfair? How blah does food taste? How pointless the television? In the ensuing days, I have often become aware of myself shaking my head, realizing that I was thinking about it again and going through that agonizing cycle of hurt and questioning. I think of my own brothers–who are not even as close to me as my friend was to his–and I shudder at the thought of losing either of them, ever, much less at an age so young. It is devastating.

Then I surface from my despair and realize that, as bad as it seems in my heart, these are not even technically my problems. I can even escape them with some denial or distraction. My friends are the ones who are truly carrying the burden. They are the ones with no fresh air when they wake up at night or sit alone in their car. No matter how heavy my weight of sadness is, no matter how much I feel for them, I see now that I can’t feel like them. I can’t reach that level. It is just not the same, no matter how empathetic I am.

My reaction to that realization, as my heart translates now, feels a lot like guilt. I feel bad–weak, like a poor friend–that I can’t fully feel their pain with them, like I am letting them down somehow by not being as deep in the trenches of struggle as they are. I guess it is because my idealistic self wants to believe if I could put myself exactly in their emotional shoes, that I could somehow take their pain away, at least some of it, by sharing the load. But I can’t.

I think that is one of my “middle age realizations,” something I didn’t register when I was younger: we don’t really know anyone else’s struggle. We can’t fully know their pain because we aren’t in their skin. And even if we have experienced “the same thing” (e.g. each having endured the death of a sibling), we had different relationships and different pasts and different natural abilities to cope with Life’s inevitable tragedies and hardships.

I used to be sure that I was a true empath, that my ability to feel other people’s pain and understand them completely was almost supernatural. I don’t believe that anymore. I know I feel horribly for so many people who have been wronged by Life in any number of ways and want badly to ease their burdens, but at this age I am finally coming to grips with the fact that that doesn’t count for having walked a mile–much less a lifetime–in their shoes. It isn’t much at all, actually.

It illuminates another of my later realizations: compassion doesn’t count for much unless you are willing to act on it. It is all well and good to feel horribly for a friend with cancer or a sibling going through divorce or a family in your community who just lost their home or a whole race of people who were enslaved or robbed of their land, but if you aren’t willing to reach out and do something for them–a kind word, an apology, a meal, reparations, a hug, your time, your attention, your labor, your teaching of others–then your compassion is just wasted potential. You have to do something.

Maybe I am just getting old and this is what “wisdom of the elders” looks like, but it sure hurts my heart to know that as badly as I feel for my loved ones, I can’t even scratch the surface when it comes to their pools of personal pain. That is a hard lesson. Sometimes learning is no fun. But what is the alternative?

How about you? How much do you feel the pain of others, and how does that play out in your life? Open up your journal and explore your experiences with hardships and tragedies? Start with your own. What are the most difficult, most painful experiences that you have gone through in your life? Whose deaths have you had to face? Which relationships have ended or been severely damaged? Have you faced a health crisis? Have you been abused? Have you lost jobs painfully or wrongfully? Have you had to move away from loved ones or had them move away from you? Have you been the victim of a damaging crime, such as a sexual assault? Have you experienced war? Natural disasters? Have you lost your home or been in financial ruin? What else has left you traumatized? How alone did you feel when facing these crises? Did it seem that there was much that your loved ones could do for you emotionally, no matter how much they cared? Did it feel as though the burden was yours alone to carry, or could the compassion of others lighten your load? How would you rate the empathy of the people in your life at the time of your hardships? Could they understand your pain? Did you try to help them to understand? Was it worth the effort? Now turn it around. What are the biggest tragedies and crises that your nearest and dearest have had to face? Go back through the list of the questions above? Which ones have they gone through? Which are happening now, or at least most recently? How have you reacted to their situations? How badly do you feel when bad things happen to other people, whether you know them or not? Do you consider yourself highly empathetic, moderately, or not very? Does that vary widely depending upon your relationships and similarities with the afflicted (e.g. I have people in my life who are deeply caring and compassionate within their families but cannot seem to summon the slightest bit of empathy when it comes to different ethnic groups or religions or social classes; it is very disturbing.)? Have you been good about expressing your compassion (i.e. is it clear to others that you feel them?)? Have you found that your empathy has helped people in their times of tragedy? Does it make them feel better that you feel bad for them? How do you show it? Words? Simple presence? Hugs? Meals? Donations? Errands or other conveniences? Prayers or positive vibes? Do you sense that there is a line in each case that, despite your best intentions and best efforts, you simply cannot get a full sense of the pain someone is feeling, that there is a level of darkness that your light can never reach? How does that make you feel? Helpless? Frustrated? Relieved? When do you feel most alone? In that moment, is there anything that anyone can do? At the end, does each of us have our own final say in our recovery from tragedy and hardship, a point when others have done all they can and we have to shoulder the load of our survival and our happiness? Even if you believe that to be the case, is there ever an excuse to bail out and become less compassionate to the struggles and burdens of others? Leave me a reply and let me know: How deeply do you feel the pain of other people?

Give your heart,

William

P.S. If today’s letter resonated with you, please share it as you see fit. Let’s awaken our hearts to the pains of other people and then do the work to ease those pains.

P.P.S. If this type of self-examination appeals to you or someone you care about, check out my book Journal of YOU: Uncovering The Beauty That Is Your Truth at your favorite online retailers.

How Fragile We Are: A Temporary Life in a Vulnerable Body

“Nature of life is fragile. Uncontrollable events happen all the time in life.” –Kilshore Bansal

Hello friend,

I had quite a health scare last week that left me physically weak and emotionally rattled. It never fails to amaze me by just how little we are hanging on.

My pain came on quite suddenly Monday afternoon. I had lay down on the sofa with a mug of cocoa to write in my journal. By the end of my entry, my stomach felt so overfull that I was disgusted with what a glutton I was. I figured that I would get up and move around, maybe use the bathroom, and things would settle down and be fine. They were not. The pain increased, but I was managing, and by the time I went to bed, I convinced myself that I would be fine in the morning and that my Tuesday would be as ordinary as ever.

How wrong I was.

I did all I could to get myself going in the morning and off to work. I felt horrible but told myself that I wouldn’t think about the doctor unless I still felt bad on Wednesday. After all, I didn’t have the fever and other symptoms of the nasty flu that has been such demolishing people all Winter, so I did not worry about infecting anyone else. It was just my own pain–constant, knee-buckling pain–in one localized area of my body. However, by late afternoon, I had begun to believe that I was not going to make it anywhere on Wednesday. I needed immediate help.

When the doctor at Urgent Care seemed confounded enough to send me home with some Maalox, I began to worry. I knew it was something serious, not just a bad tummy ache. As a last resort, she ordered a blood test, the results of which had her ordering me to go directly to the Emergency Room.

It was a quiet, solemn ten minutes in the car. “So this is how my story ends, eh?” That was the first thought in my head. I thought of all the people who have unwittingly embarked on their final day or final chapter of existence under the most ordinary circumstances. They got up and went to work that day as usual, and by the end of the day, they had been crushed by a car or had a stroke or received a diagnosis that would signal the their demise and final destiny. I thought I might be in that last category. I envisioned the ER doctors, after a series of scans, informing me that a malignant tumor had taken over the organs of my abdomen and that there was nothing more they could do but try to keep me comfortable until my certain death arrived, all of which I then had to explain to my wife when she arrived at the hospital. I wasn’t scared or panicked on that drive, but I definitely had a good cry. Maybe it was that awful vision, maybe it was the pain, and maybe it was that I was all alone. In any case, I wept for the final few minutes of the drive. Then, when I pulled into the parking lot, I got myself together to face my new reality, whatever that would be.

A couple of lonely and painful hours later–with a few more cries mixed in when the nurses would leave my room–after those envisioned scans were completed, I lay there contemplatively and awaited the results. I marveled at how, at any moment, some news would casually enter the room and either shatter my entire existence (as well as the lives of my wife and kids) or grant me a temporary reprieve. I pondered disbelievingly at how nonchalant that Fate can be, how lives get snuffed out and turned upside down in the most ordinary moments.  

Drunk driver. Aneurysm. School shooting. Diagnosis.

All day long. Every day of the year.  

Was the coming moment–the one that was so ordinary to everyone but me–about to be my moment? I wasn’t fretting, but I wasn’t forcing optimism, either. I think I was mostly in awe of the absolute powerlessness I felt. I was supremely aware of the blunt fact that Fate could do whatever she wanted with the fragile vessel that was my body, that it was completely out of my control and always would be. I served at her pleasure. There was the sense that the IVs and other tubes and machines I was hooked up to were there simply to administer helplessness. It was palpable.

I had never felt so insignificant in all my life.

So, what did I feel when the doctor came in with her sober face and her “I’m sorry to have to tell you this…” tone and told me that I had an appendicitis and would need to have surgery immediately? I felt relief. Relief that I got to go back home in a day or two to resume my normal life of pretending that I know how each day will go and that I have some control over the outcome. Relief that I got to go chase my kids around again and act as though we will certainly have all the time in the world together. Relief that my wife and I could resume our happy assumption that we will grow old together. Relief that I got to write another book and more of these letters to you. And ultimately, relief that I could feel like, “OF COURSE I will do all of that.” Of course.

I suppose it is an amazing privilege to live in a place and time that we can so easily delude ourselves that all will be well for the foreseeable future. I live in American suburbia in the 21st century. In spite of the nonsense in Washington and the regular mass shootings around the country, it is my privilege to drink clean water, have access to quality medical care, and feel physically safe where I live and reasonably certain of what comes next.

But let’s be honest: it’s still an illusion of safety and certainty. Those things aren’t real. We are at the whims of Fate. That aneurysm or drunk driver can hit at any moment.

That was the sobering reality that hit me on the way to the Emergency Room and remained on my shoulder as I waited for the doctor to deliver the news. I knew that she could just as easily speak the words “stomach cancer” as “appendicitis” when she walked through the door, and that Fate’s flip-of-the-coin might bring the other answer to the person waiting in the next room. We were both powerless to change her verdict.

Even after I received the “good news” and felt that big exhalation of relief, that peek behind the curtain of Reality left me rattled emotionally. For the next few days, I was a raw nerve.

When my kids came to see me the next day in the hospital, it was all I could do to keep from bursting out crying. They were the thing I stood to lose on that coin flip, after all, and I had shuddered even more at the thought of them losing me at their age. If they weren’t already wearing Fear on their faces at seeing me hooked up to all those tubes, I know I would have let out an involuntary sob. As it was, I fought it back and just told them I loved them and missed them terribly in the day that had passed. I was the same way when my Mom called. I could hardly breathe–much less speak–in my effort to keep the floodgates closed.

The thing that finally burst the dam was a movie. On the morning I was released from the hospital, I went home to nap in my bed. When I woke, I started a movie that I had long wanted to watch on Netflix, “Fruitvale Station.” It is based on a true story of a young man’s last day on Earth, ending in his murder. On a different day, I might have finished watching and been angry at the injustice of the murder and sad about the loss to the young man’s mother, child, and girlfriend, but I think I would have moved on without much drama. Not this day. No, I lay in bed and sobbed and sobbed at the random and senseless cruelty of the world and how we walk daily along that razor’s edge between a happy normalcy and a completely shattered existence. Shortly after I stopped crying, my wife came home, took one look at me, and asked what had happened. I couldn’t even get the words out; I just sobbed and sputtered some more.

That peek behind the curtain had broken me. It was Life and the unfairness and uncertainty of it. And it was the sheer recklessness of Fate. How it could take that young man with the beautiful daughter and his newfound resolution to be better. How it could casually erase the lives of children in the middle of a normal school day. How it could nonchalantly shake the Earth and crumble the homes in one town but not another, then turn around and scatter terminal diagnoses all over the planet. And it was the absolute clarity that, despite the fact that I got off easy this time, it could just as easily have gone the other way.

All of that reality caught up to me in that moment, and I let it all out through my eyes.

In the days that have followed, my body has grown stronger, and with it I have rebuilt my illusion. I no longer spend the day thinking about how completely fragile each of our existences is. I am getting past that jarring sensation I felt upon realizing how temporary and random are our lives and deaths. I am planning for the future again, even as I am reminding myself to be present and enjoy each moment I have here with these beautiful people that I call mine. I am telling myself that waking up early for the gym each morning will let me live a longer, happier, and healthier life. I am trying to be “normal” again.

I have to admit though, that there is a thin veil over my normal now. I got spooked last week on my way to the hospital. Spooked by Reality. You know that traumatized feeling you get when someone just about rams into you with their car as you are driving–that freaked out, breathless, sobering kind of spook? It was like that, but instead of dissipating after a few minutes, it stayed. So I am wondering: will this gun-shy feeling go away with time, or will every moment of joy and freedom and planning and dreaming be tinged with that peek behind the curtain, that look into Fate’s eyes, the same way that Death has a way of leaving that tinge on every moment thereafter? I will have to wait and see, I suppose.

Still, I can’t help but think that it will become harder and harder to shake the truth that our existence–my existence–is a temporary and uncertain one in a body that is vulnerable to the whims of Fate and random chance. I’m not sure that will ever quite sit well with me.

How about you? How do you make peace with the vulnerability of your body and the random and uncertain nature of Life in general? Open up your journal and go deep as you pull back the curtain on this topic that we typically keep ourselves in denial about. How often, if ever, do you allow yourself to fully absorb how vulnerable your body is to any number of potential destructions? Does it take a personal crisis, such as a car crash or medical emergency? Do you feel it when there is an “act of God” that makes the news, such as an earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami that kills lots of people? How about things nearby, such as when someone in your community is stricken with cancer or killed by a drunk driver? Does it hit you at all when you hear of tragedies further away from home, such as a famine in Africa or a genocide in Syria? Do you brush those things quickly past your awareness, or do you allow them in? How does each of these types of peril affect you? What makes one type more staggering than the other? Does it have to happen directly to you to affect you deeply, or is your empathy enough to be shaken by these occurrences in others? When you feel it, how quickly are you able to get back to your illusion of safety and security? Is that a healthy and necessary denial? Is it also healthy to have these periodic reminders (read: scares) to help you to see that life is to be cherished and not wasted? Overall, how free are you of the shadow of this near-death existence that you live every day? How has that changed as you have aged? Leave me a reply and let me know: How do you navigate life in your fragile and temporary body?  

Spread sunlight,

William

P.S. If this resonated with you today, please share it on your social media channels. Let us grow and thrive in community!

The Belated Summer Reading List

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” –William Styron

Hello friend,

You know those Summer Reading Lists you see in the magazines and on websites around Memorial Day? I love those lists! You know the ones: they assume you have unlimited time in the Summer, so they tell you all the cool books to read by the beach or pool as you chill your way through the season. They give you some hot new authors and some literary giants, some fiction and some nonfiction. Everyone has one of these lists: Oprah, Amazon, Goodreads, The Washington Post, PBS, you name it. They always get me so excited about my favorite thing: books!

Well, I am sorry to say that you will not find one of those great Summer Book Lists on this page next May!

I have never been one to plan my reading. I go by intuition. When I finish one book, I just scour the shelves and the lists and choose the one that feels right to me. Before I look, I cannot tell you if I will be choosing a title in Teen Fiction, New Age, Classics, Self-Help, History, Humor, or Memoir. I find something to love in all of them as long as I trust my gut in the choosing.

So, my apologies for not providing you with yet another prescription for your Summer reading. Because guess what: September is here, and Autumn is knocking!

Thus, the best I can do for you is to tell you about all the great stuff I read over the Summer. Like the usual lists, I have a mix of genres for you and a mix of authors new and old. So, lets get started!

I came into the Summer reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. I had seen the movie years ago when it came out, not knowing it had been a book. Thankfully, though, by the time I got around to the book, I had no recollection of the movie, except a few of the stunning visual images. I always enjoy a book that has something of the spiritual woven into the story, so this was a good start to my Summer reading. It also helped that much of it took place in hot climates and on the water, which put my mind in the right spot for the season.

Alongside my personal reading, I also read every night at bedtime with my daughter, who just turned nine during the course of the Summer. Our very first book of the season was Roald Dahl’s Matilda, which was fun. We then moved into the complex web of people and places in Middle Earth with J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic The Lord of the Rings. The book is enormous and not exactly in my genre wheelhouse, so I was relieved when we finished the second of the six “books” in the book—enough to get us through what would have been the first of the three movies—and my daughter decided we should move on to something different. Maybe some day we will return for the rest. It won’t bother me if we don’t.

The next book for me was James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain. I had recently watched the magnificent and moving documentary about Baldwin, “I Am Not Your Negro”, and was eager to get into his writing. I knew he was famous for his nonfiction essays and his fiction, and though I figured the nonfiction would be just my speed—I was drawn to The Fire Next Time–I decided on this more famous novel. I should have gone with my gut. Though I certainly appreciated his writing and very much liked certain chapters, the subject matter just didn’t hold me very well. I was ready for something new.

It was not lost on me that perhaps I was striking out because I was trying out novels. Though I enjoy all genres, my go-to areas tend to be autobiographies and nonfiction (self-help, spiritual, or anything that expands my knowledge). I generally spread out my fiction attempts.   For whatever reason, though, I was in the mood for more fiction.

After these misses and with my determination to find a novel that I loved, I was beginning to wonder if my Summer reading was going to be a giant FAIL. How wrong I was!

It was just at that moment of doubt that I struck literary gold (er, purple). It was Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. I had seen the film version many years before—it is my wife’s favorite movie—but had forgotten most of it (which I always think is a godsend). It was brilliant on so many fronts and I was completely moved by the story and the complications of social injustice. It is a true masterpiece for any season.

I thank Alice Walker for starting my Summer hot streak, because I came into some wonderful words after that one. I always love when someone gives me a book, because I know it is, quite literally, meant for me. So it was with Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, a book about keeping curiosity and artistic expression in your life forever. I don’t know if everyone would connect to this book, but I surely did. It helped me to put my writing habit/passion into perspective with my bigger life. Truly, it changed my thinking. Behold, the power of books!

As I read that one, I also started a novel recommended to me by my teenage nieces: Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay For Now. It may have taken me a couple of chapters to warm up to it, but then I was in. It is books like that one (probably aimed at early teens) and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars (both categorized as Teen Fiction) that prove to me that “great books for kids” are truly great books for adults. I will read Okay For Now with my daughter in a couple years, no doubt.

Speaking of my daughter, we moved from The Lord of the Rings to Island of the Blue Dolphins. It was interesting, not mind-blowing. Then we went to the Deep South with perhaps America’s signature novel, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. I had last read it in high school and—surprise, surprise—had forgotten what the story was all about. Though we both liked it, in hindsight I would have also waited a couple more years to read this one with her. It forced some discussions that would be better suited for the light of day rather than in a dark room at bedtime. But still, a great book.

While that was going on, I was engrossed in an absolute gem of a book, Between the World and Me. Written in the form of a letter from the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, to his teenage son, this book is simultaneously enlightening and devastatingly sad. And the quality of the writing is unparalleled. It is an essential read for anyone trying to deepen their empathy, and particularly trying to understand what it feels like to be a Black man in America. It gripped me completely and remains with me weeks later.

So grateful for this beautiful stretch of reading, I moved into the final days of Summer with three of my pet topics: death, religion/spirituality, and the Holocaust.

My niece, also a student of religions, gave me a copy of Peter Rollins’s The Orthodox Heretic, a book of modern parables and commentary. It touches on a topic that often riles me up, which is the incongruity between the teachings of Jesus and the actions of his followers. I am plodding slowly through this one and am only halfway there, but I quite like all of the things it stirs in me. It is wonderful fodder for journal entries.

I happen to have a perhaps-unhealthy fascination (maybe obsession) with death, especially “premature” death and how to come to grips with it. With that, I selected Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which tracked the strange tricks her mind played on her in the year following her husband’s sudden death. I came away with more empathy for those who have lost loved ones and a greater understanding of the enormous power, longevity, and unpredictability of grief.

Staying with the Death theme, I moved to Tell My Sons, by Lt. Col. Mark M. Weber. I was drawn to it because it was written as a letter of advice and guidance from a father who was dying of cancer to his three sons. That is the kind of thing I imagine myself doing if such a dreadful diagnosis arrives at my doorstep. I am still in the middle of it, but it has already led to lots of morbid daydreaming.

The last book on my Summer list, which I will finish today, is Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry. I am reading it with my daughter, as the protagonist is a girl only a year older, whose family is helping their friends, a Jewish family, to escape the Nazis during World War II. It is well done, another “kid book” that is appropriate for adults.

That’s it! That was my Summer of Reading! Well, of course, I read hundreds of articles to keep me informed on the madness that is our world today, too, but I love the books so much more. I learned from each one and would recommend each (but to different people). If you made me choose the ones that impressed me the most, I would go with The Color Purple and Between the World and Me, for both their ideas and the quality of the writing.

I don’t know why I chose so many fiction titles—nine of the fourteen—compared to my usual pace. Perhaps it was the spirit of the season, the way those Summer Book List articles glamorize the “page-turner” novels as poolside reads. I don’t regret it, though. It was fun! I don’t have a clue as to what I will read and suggest to you for next Summer. Tell you what: I’ll let you know next Fall!

How about you? What have you been reading all Summer? Open up your journal and make a timeline and some book reports. What is on your list? Did you read mostly fiction or nonfiction? Is that normal for you? How did you decide what to read? Did you take any recommendations from the “Hot Books for Summer” lists from the magazines or websites? Did you use your social media community? I always love when I see a post where one of my friends asks for book recommendations, because I then scour the Comments section for ideas. Did any of your books open your eyes to the way other people live and see the world—The Color Purple and Between the World and Me did this for me—or change the way you look at the big things in your normal life, like Big Magic did for me? What else did your Summer books do for you? Give you an escape? Teach you a new skill or idea? Remind you of what is important? Make you treat yourself better? Make you treat others better? Frighten you? Inspire you?  Which will you recommend the most?  Which is your favorite?  Aren’t books just totally amazing??? I love them! Is there something different about Summer reading? Leave me a reply and let me know: What is on your Summer Reading List?

Live a thousand lives,

William

P.S. If this resonated with you, please share it. Let’s get our lists together!

LIFE IS SHORT: What are you going to do about it?

“Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” –Steve Jobs

Hello friend,

Last weekend, my wife’s family had a reunion. From the pictures on Facebook, it looked like a fun and festive time for all. The next day at the hotel, check-out time came and went, but her cousin had not come out of his room. Finding no answer at the door, the hotel staff let themselves in. He was dead. Massive heart attack. He was only in his forties, a few years older than me.

Talk about a gut-punch. Even though I didn’t know him, all the photos I ever saw showed what looked like a healthy, vibrant man with a mega-watt smile that lit up the whole scene. He looked like a guy you wanted to get to know, wanted to be around. Good energy. And just like that, he is gone.

I know that death strikes a blow to each of us differently, obviously depending upon who the person was to us, but also playing a role are what age they were, how similar their circumstances were to our own, how they died, and the legacy they are leaving behind based on how they lived.

Clearly, when a person we know and love dies, there is an intensely personal process of grieving to work through, a process that pervades every aspect of our lives during that period and colors our lenses a different way.

Something quite distinct happens—at least to me—when someone I do not know well dies.   I go inside myself for a while. I feel hurt by it. Deeply hurt. Not necessarily because of that individual and the pain their loved ones are feeling—though I certainly sympathize, we are talking here about people I am not so personally involved with—but hurt from a different source.

I guess you could say that death causes me to feel hurt by the Universe. It’s a philosophical thing, I suppose. I am pained—tortured, even—by the unfairness of life on Earth and how, in the tiny moment a gun is shot or an artery closed, a beautiful life comes to an abrupt end. As deeply as I have probed the spiritual realm and as prepared as I have many times felt to be taken to the next realm, I somehow still come back to this place where the brevity of life–and the nonguaranteed nature of the next moment—just don’t sit right with me. It feels unfair. And anyone who knows me well knows that unfairness burns me to my core.

But that is life. Short, uncertain, and unfair.

Yes, it is amazing, precious, and littered with beauty everywhere you look, too. I know, and I see it that way, believe me. But in certain moments, like when a smiley young man dies of a massive heart attack in his hotel room, the short, uncertain, and unfair side sure delivers a blow to my psyche.

After I go through my process of feeling sad about that person’s loved ones and the life left behind, inevitably I drift into this patch of days where that death—and “Death” itself, the concept, with a capital D—begins to play on the strings of my soul. The reality of how quickly my own life is passing, not to mention the very real possibility that it could end at any moment for countless reasons beyond my control, gets into my core and really stirs things up.

The bigger questions of my existence here become front-and-center issues in my consciousness. How well am I using your time? What positive impact am I making on my world? Am I using my gifts? Am I allowing my soul to emerge, or is my ego keeping it at bay? Am I living the life I want to live, or the life my parents or society think I should live? Am I making the most of every day? Am I in this moment, or am I stuck in the past or future? Am I sucking the marrow out of life or just drifting by? Am I making a LIFE or just a living? Am I being brave enough? Loving enough? Optimistic enough? Empathetic enough? Forgiving enough? Kind enough? At the end of my days, when my life flashes before my eyes, will it be a show I enjoy and am proud of? Am I living my Truth?  

These questions sometimes elicit sobering answers from my mind. Because they are tough ones. Sure, they can be wonderful tools of motivation, serving to remind me of what is most important. But they are also tools of torture. The questions sometimes haunt as much they inspire.

Because, you see, somebody else didn’t get to ask themselves these questions again. Somebody didn’t get another reminder that it is time to make good, time to be bigger and more authentic. I hate that part of it.

When someone my own age or younger than me dies, it is particularly haunting. It makes me start to think it is all borrowed time from here on out. I have to live the kind of life that will allow me to answer those big questions affirmatively precisely because that person didn’t get a chance to. They weren’t allowed the golden opportunity of this day to do something greater, to love bigger, to chase their dreams longer and harder. I get this day that they don’t, and I feel like I owe it to them to do my absolute best, both in my heart and in the world.

I have to stop limiting myself. I have to claim my dreams and give myself fewer excuses for not getting them done. I have to rid my life of the things and people that waste my precious time and energy so that I can devote those resources to doing what I love with the people that I love in the service of this world that I love. Nothing less than that. No compromises. I simply have to be more brave and more disciplined with the life my soul calls upon me to live, for all of the nonguaranteed moments I have left. Death will come for me one day, unbidden, and I would like to be in the midst of something magnificent when it does.

How about you? How can you go about living so as to make your death, whenever it may come, more palatable to you? Open up your journal and make an honest assessment of what you need to do to make the most of your remaining days on this Earth. In what areas are you currently falling short of your standards for a life well-lived? Are you aware of ways that you can right the ship? How much work will it take: is it tweaks or monumental shifts? Are you committed to making the change? Are you like me and sometimes need something as shocking as a death to wake you up to the ways you have gone astray and the need to get back to your Truth before your time is up? What other moments have you had that were reminders of how short this life is? What can you do to keep your priorities front and center, to not waste a day? Is the prospect of death enough to embolden you to live your dreams? I encourage you to go back up a few paragraphs to the italics and ask yourself those questions of existence that are pressing upon me now. I hope your answers to those questions are motivation enough to point you in the direction of your True North. Leave me a reply and let me know: What must you do to make the most of your dash, however short or long it may be?

Be unapologetically you,

William

P.S. If this got you to consider your existence, and perhaps imagine some new possibilities, I encourage you to share it. We all need a little reminder sometimes. Be well!

The One-Item Bucket List: what MUST you do before you die?

IMG_1171“I’m the one that’s got to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.” –Jimi Hendrix

Hello friend,

Did you ever come to an important realization about yourself, only to smack yourself in the head and say, “Well, that was obvious! Why did it take me so long to figure this out?” If your answer is YES, then you are in good company, because that is totally me right now!

I have been lately working every day on what I call TJP, short for “The Journal Project.” Essentially, TJP is a life review, using my 20+ years of journals, in an effort to better understand who I have been and how I have come to be the man I am today. But it’s also much more than that. It’s a book in the making. I am attempting to construct a readable story using only journal entries. It was originally intended just for me, but then I thought I might make it for my kids so they would understood who their old man really was. Finally, I decided to see if maybe my thoughts could be helpful to a wider audience. So, that’s how I am reading the entries now, with an eye toward a real book. I won’t know until I finish the project if it has value for anyone besides me, but I hope that it works out that way. If not, just going through the process will have at least taught me one important thing that I didn’t know before: that I am a writer.

You see, it was around the time I was starting The Journal Project that I was coming up on my 40th birthday. Somehow, whether it was the approaching milestone or just coincidence, I began to obsess about finding my true purpose in life and doggedly pursuing my dreams. As I read through my first few volumes from around 15 years before, all sorts of references to my desire to write books jumped off the pages at me. Examples:

October 20, 1997: “…but I just want to write all the time. I stop myself so many times in the day from pulling out the pen because I know I haven’t really anything to say. It’s all I want, though, it seems.”

December 10, 1997: “When I think of the concept of writing a book, it just seems so big and daunting. But the thing is, I know I can. I have no doubt that it will be a ton of work, but that aspect excites me to no end. I want to be up to my ears in it. I love the image of writing through the night on some incendiary ideas which evolve into world-changing passages.”

May 3, 1998: “Perhaps I should begin to organize my first book.”

August 23, 1998: “I was just thinking, I think I should write for a living.”

July 3, 1999: “I wonder how many of these things (journals) I will fill up before I finally write a book and publish it. Thirty? Fifty? I think this is the fourteenth one. Shoot, maybe that number will be 100. It is coming to me, though.”

September 27, 1999: “I really want to write books one day. I want to be an author and a lecturer, a teacher to all.”

October 4, 1999: “Wow! I cannot wait to start writing. The time is approaching when I explode onto this world with love and hope for all. I feel it in me.”

These passages seemed to stand out in bold to me as I read them. Why? Because I had almost completely forgotten how badly I had wanted to write books. I mean it. I fell into a long phase of life during which I was focused on my “realistic” career and marriage and parenting, and the thing I was most passionate about doing faded out of my mind. I took my eye off the ball, fell asleep at the wheel.

Fast forward all those years later, from my mid-twenties to almost 40, and the search for my passion, my true calling, finally woke me from that phase that I now call “Sleepwalking.” Suddenly, my journal entries began to be littered with thoughts that had disappeared those many years ago:

September 14, 2012: “I will write a book. I will. Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later. I am excited.”

September 19, 2012: “I am fairly clear now that I will not be a novelist. My books will be non-fiction, most likely involving self-help/confidence, spirituality, or tennis, or perhaps all three together.”

September 27, 2012: “…I have often thought of writing an autobiography, or trying to piece together an interesting story of a man—me—told only through journal entries. Probably it would only be interesting to me, but it may be very satisfying to work on anyway. Who knows? There may be something there. I will keep this in my head.”

October 3, 2012: “So I will be a writer instead. I am going to keep telling myself that—I have just recently giving myself permission to announce my dreams, at least to myself—at least until it comes true. The more I say it, the more it pushes me to start doing something about it. That is, to start writing, or at least researching, brainstorming, and jotting notes about what I want to write. It is a first step in the right direction. This is going to work.”

October 13, 2012: “With this ‘announcing’ thing on my mind lately, and me making my ‘Write, William. WRITE!!!” sign for my desk, I thought it fortuitous when I received this quote on Thursday from one of my greatest idols/inspirations, Henry David Thoreau: ‘A single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we must walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.’ I am a writer. I am a writer. I am a writer. I share myself with the world in order to educate the world. By giving of myself, I can make the world better. My thoughts are worth sharing. I am a writer. I am a writer. I am a writer.”

Even though those entries were almost four years ago now and you still don’t have a book of mine in your hands, I am pleased to report that this time, I have not forgotten. The book has sometimes had to be put on the back burner for long stretches as Life intervened, but it has never left the stove. And lately, I have been pushing hard on it. It is far from complete—probably there are years of work left—but there is no longer any doubt that I will complete it. And if my first one isn’t worth publishing, I will write another one. And another.

My bucket list—you know, those things you plan to do before you die—has only one line on it: WRITE A BOOK. Oh sure, there are other things I want to do before I kick the bucket—learn to snowboard, take my kids on a National Parks trip, get back on a surfboard, learn the guitar, live on a beach—but there is only one thing I need to do in order to die satisfied. It’s the thing I once knew, then forgot about, and then was reminded of again, thanks to my journals. I need to publish a book. Sure, I plan to publish many, but one is the absolute minimum standard before I go. That’s all I need to do.

How about you? What one thing do you need to do before you die in order to leave satisfied? Open up your journal and flesh out your deepest need. This is a tough one, because it forces you to separate needs from desires. Start off more generally, making a list of everything on your wish list of life experiences or achievements. What types of things come first to your mind? Are they career goals, like promotions or raises? Learning a new skill, such as a musical instrument or a language? Travel? Physical achievements, such as weight loss or running a marathon? Adventures, like sky-diving or swimming with dolphins? After you have your list together, see if something stands out and speaks to your soul more forcefully than the others, something you are unusually drawn to. Would that experience be enough to allow you to die satisfied? How risky is it for you to pursue this most important endeavor? Risky in what way—financially, physically, emotionally, or something else? How far out of your comfort zone is it? Is it something you have always dreamed about? Have you verbalized it, even if only to yourself (your version of my “I am a writer” mantra)? How difficult is your item to achieve? Do you need help from anyone to achieve it? Are you willing to ask for that help? How long until you will be reasonably able to knock this off your list? What will it mean to you to have done it? Will it bring more excitement or relief? How badly would it disappoint you to not do it? Leave me a reply and let me know: What one thing must you do that will allow you to die satisfied?

No day but today,

William

P.S. If this letter helped you put some things in perspective for your life, pass it on. I encourage you to sign up to receive each week’s post in your email inbox. Now write!