As the last month of the year approaches and we are all faced with the end of yet another calendar, it is time to put on our reflection caps.
Or our diving caps, thank you Greg Louganis.
This weekend, I had the privilege of attending Tedx Malibu. The theme of the conference was Living Out Loud — or living in ways that makes your passion audibly palpable to others. One by one, as amazing artists, producers, athletes, and actors from all over the U.S. took the platform, I sat frantically taking notes. Surely, if I became introspective enough, I could leave transformed.
As my pen plummeted on, I soon noticed notes weren’t the point. In fact, the point was quite the opposite… but, being that I’m a writer, I’ll leave you with some frosty fortune cookie bites to take with you into December:
Love. Tell your truth. And get serious about the business of life.
Figure out your name.
And what one thing you alone can teach.
And who it is that you serve.
And what those that you serve most need to keep coming alive.
Keep coming alive yourself, because, most often, people need reminders of innocence and wonder.
Recognize the seconds that surround you as an invitation to enter exactly where you belong.
If you don’t know where you belong, embrace that too. You just may not fully fit in.
Make your awkwardness your trademark.
If, in the search of where you belong, you realize you don’t know where you are, trust that you are smack in the center of Love’s gaping arms.
Use Love as your greatest springboard.
Keep making leaps. Giant jumps. Sure, sometimes our leaps are mistakes, but never making a leap is always a mistake. Sometimes when we leap, we learn to fly and other times, we are caught by angels just before we crash into the dust.
Either way, the landing is more cushioned than we imagined.
Be grateful for your problems. They keep you sharp and ingenuitive. They keep you re-imagining your situation and thinking outside of your perfectly planned boxes. And, in retrospect, they are life’s greatest short-cuts. They fuel creative juices faster than the perfectly paved roads.
Trust that roadblocks are protecting you from danger. They are not there to trap you or slow you down.
But sometimes you need to slow down.
Screw plan A. Plan B is much better.
The unexamined life is not worth living. But the overexamined life is sadly never even lived.
Death is not what scares us. Unlived life scares us. But don’t be scared. We can do nothing about our mortality, but we can do everything about the way we spend our lives. So get to living, please.
And be sure to drink your Ovaltine.