As it turns out, I lied to my high school students.

I, who prided myself in being a straight shooter, who felt my gentle but honest way was the cornerstone to who I was in the classroom, blatantly lied.

At 23, I was named the director of Student Activities at the high school where I coached and taught, not because I was mature and wise or supremely capable, but because I was 23 and school administrators figured who better to give up her nights, weekends, spring breaks, etc to put on pep rallies and pageants, travel with the kids around the southeast to conferences, work football and basketball games, you get the picture.  But I loved these kids, loved being with them and learning from them, and, maybe just maybe, I’d be able to impart something on them along the way.  So I was in, full-heart.

It was on one of those out of town conference trips that I told that whopper of a lie.  We were eating lunch at a Wendy’s en route from here to there.  We’d played the customary practical jokes on each other along the way and were now just talking about the days ahead, and, like any teens, they wanted to know what they’d be allowed to do.

And like anyone caring for someone else’s kids, I was pretty protective.  They were probably hoping that I’d be lenient because I was 23.  But it was because I was 23 that the opposite was true.  I knew way too much about what could befall them if my expectations were low or unclear.  I tightened my grip on them.

“You’re stricter than my parents,” one of them groaned with both affection and annoyance.

And that’s when I told the lie- though, back then, I was so certain that I was right.  It would take me more than a decade to realize how poorly I knew myself, how cavalier I had been about my heart.

“Look,” I answered.  “You are somebody else’s kid, and I’ve been entrusted with your safety.  I’m not messing around with that responsibility.  Now, if you were my kid, I’d tell you to have at it and not even notice if you were playing in the street.  But you aren’t my kid.”

There are goats near our house whose job it is to eat the kudzu along a beautiful trail.  Happy loves those goats, and we go to see them often.  To keep the goats accounted for and safe from coyotes, they are enclosed in an electric fence.  Happy knows that he cannot touch the fence; he seems to understand that he should stay away, and, yet, every time we go to see the goats, panic licks my stomach.  As he tries to assert his independence by drifting away from me,  I reassert my mother-ness by stepping closer.  He steps away, I step closer.  We do this dance already, and he is only two.

Before I became a mother, I rarely- if ever- suffered anxiety of any kind nor was I sentimental.  In fact, I would have probably answered that I was fundamentally unsentimental.  Now, the outfit Happy wore on the day we met is packed away for posterity.  I nurse a stomachache more often than I care to admit.  This isn’t to say I have generalized anxiety, anxiety is really serious, and I don’t want to belittle its diagnosis or treatment at all.  What I do wish to say is that motherhood has changed me.  It has given me the most precious thing I’ve ever experienced.  And it has made me profoundly aware of how much damage, how much devastation loss would cause.  It has made me even more sensitive to suffering.  I send him off sometimes, without me, and I think, will they love him like I do?  Will he make good choices?  Will they recognize his inherent sweetness in the midst of all that in-your-face energy?  Will he be safe?  Will he be treated kindly?  Will anything break his spirit while he’s away?  Will he remember that he is loved and cherished?  Will his needs get met?  Will he be able to meet his own needs?  Can he do it?

There will be a day when Happy pulls away from me as we walk downtown- where my firm YOU MUST HOLD MY HAND grip and voice will no longer hold muster (just so you know, I am imagining this day will happen when he is 18)- and my heart will soar into my throat.  It will pulsate there; it will vibrate to me with an emphaetic SAVE ME, SAVE ME, it will simultaneously laugh at and scold that cavalier 23 year old who said she’d let her kid dance so dangerously close to the edge.  And I will be holding these words on the knife-edge blade of my tongue:  COME BACK!  COME BACK RIGHT NOW!  YOU CAN’T BECAUSE I CAN”T HANDLE IT.  I will cover my mouth with my palm, clamp down the terror, and I will say to myself, “It’s okay.  You are screaming these things to protect your own heart, but to build his heart you must let him go.”

And I will think of my sweet, once 17 year old students.  How they were more ready than I realized.  How loving them was a gift I gave them but protecting them forever was not my right.  I will remember how they each blossomed.  I will marvel at their continued loveliness.  I will seek comfort in the truth that it is the foundation you lay down that matters.  Not the walls you create from fear.

*originally posted on July 19, 2011

photo by Jill E. Williams

I am reading Portia de Rossi’s Unbearable Lightness, and I am struck by how she was paralyzed by, even at a young age, being perfect.  It’s so heartbreaking to read: her fear of failure, of being judged, of being anything less than great is so palpable.  It’s hard to read because it is hard to know that just one person went through this, but the truth is that hundreds of thousands of girls go through this every day in their quest for effortless perfection.

What is effortless perfection?  It’s a term that Duke University students used to describe the way they felt they needed to come across to their peers– as if they were beautiful, smart, capable, funny, etc all with very little effort.  I look good?  Oh, I just rolled out of bed and threw on the first thing I saw.  These good looks, shiny locks, naturally flushed skin just happen.  I did not spend hours perfecting the tossled wave look, I swear.  What do you get if you master effortless perfection?  Some would say the admiration of others.  I worry, though, that it might be limitless anxiety and fear or even worse.

Last week, I was emailing with a new friend about how we don’t really need to be so perfect.  If I never admitted to having insecurities to my students or friends, if I acted like self-acceptance was just the easiest thing in the world to achieve and embrace, then what I become is unrelatable in that untruth.  And being unrelatable isn’t good for anyone and, for every one of us, leaves us incapable of doing what we’re meant to do in the world.  It is our relatability, our own imperfections, our realness that unite us.  Perfection is, after all, just an illusion, a torturing, self-deprecating (ironically) farce.  It is the messy stuff, the lessons we learn, the scars that show our character.

I once dated a man who traced the outermost limits of a huge scar I had on my knee–  a scar that I had obtained after tumbling down 20 wooden apartment stairs and landing knee first on the concrete below (I was racing to take a friend to the airport at the crack of dawn and had his Christmas gift in my hand.  I held the gift up to keep it from crashing into the concrete which meant that something else had to)- and said, “scars show character.”  He won me in that moment, affirming what I had always believed: it is the difficult things that make you rich, give your life personality and flavor in ways that the easy things cannot evoke.  Years later, I remember that lesson best from him.  Don’t hide your scars.  Use them to reveal your character.

I am more than ten years removed from teaching high school and, yet, there are two lessons that I am still particularly proud of delivering and neither of them had anything to do with the subject matters I taught.  Once, in the midst of a United States history class, a student asked me an in-depth question whose answer I did not know.  I could have beat around the bush, I could have played it off, but, instead, I just chose to be myself.

“I have no idea, Charnita (I still remember who asked the question.  And the question had something to do about banking history- definitely not my forte).  The cool thing about being a history teacher is that I know a little about a whole lot, but I don’t know everything about anything.  But what if we make this deal.  If you do the research and find the answer to your question and present it to the class, I’ll give you extra credit.”

The next class, she came in with the answer– she had sought it out from a VP at Bank of America (this was before you could find most answers on the internet).  I was so proud of her tenacity that I called her mom to tell her the whole story- the part where I, the teacher, didn’t know the answer and where her daughter found it.

The other lesson I am particularly proud of happened that same school year but with a different class.  As a group of students was preparing to give a presentation, one of the students, a football player and wrestler, did a push-up against the desk that I had in the front of the classroom.

“Alright, strong guy,” I teased.  “We all know you have muscles.  Now show us what you have for brains.”

One of my students swivel-headed towards me.

“Moli, that’s not like you to make fun of one of us.”  And, boy, did he have me there.  In my classroom, the big nos were saying shut up, stupid, or acting in a way that made someone else feel like his or her voice didn’t matter.  “We are together for 90 minutes each class,” I had told them in the beginning.  ”That means we’re family.  We are all each other’s cheerleaders.  We are all each other’s champions.  We take care of each other.  We look out for each other.  We protect each other.  That doesn’t mean we can’t have fun.  We just can’t have unkind fun that is at someone else’s expense.”

My own words rang in my ears while Nathan (yep, remember his name, too) confronted me.

“You are absolutely right, Nathan.  That wasn’t okay for me to say.  I’m sorry, Sean.  And I am sorry to all of you.  I promised that all of you would be safe in my classroom and that has to start with me.  Sean, I hope you’ll forgive me.  And I hope the rest of you know that I am sorry and embarrassed and that will not happen again.”

So there you have it.  Two of the best lessons I think I delivered as a high school teacher, and they were both rooted in my imperfections.  I think of those lessons often as I parent Happy, as I strive to be the mother I am meant to be- one who isn’t perfect but who is honest, one who tries hard and learns fast, one who is true to her word and her heart, one who shows him that the way isn’t always smooth nor does it have to be perfect, but it does need to be true.  To him. To humanity. To hope.

Today, I am reminding myself to embrace my imperfections because just like that jagged terrain on my knee, they reveal my character.  I hope you’ll join me on this journey of being true to our whole selves, scars and all, so that we don’t reinforce to our friends and family or raise a generation of kids who believe that it is in being perfect, in hiding their imperfections, that they will be most valued.

* originally posted in May 2011

The time: Monday morning.  The scene: my closet.  The problem: what to wear to be on television. The challenge: the transition in weather makes me not want to wear long pants and a long sleeve jacket (my fall and winter professional wardrobe) but my spring wardrobe doesn’t really have anything that’s appropriate for television.   The result: one suit, six pairs of pants, and one dress strewn across the closet floor.

After the television segment (where I decided on a flowy, bright colored tunic that I normally wear with blue jeans but instead ultimatlely wore with black slacks to be more professional), one of the interviewers asked if I was totally fine with my body.

Cue: closet scene.

The TV reporter’s question wasn’t unusual.  A lot of people ask me how I feel about my body.  I think they all want to know it is really possible to get past the body hatred free for all that sometimes takes up space in our head.  Here’s the good news.  It is possible.  But it doesn’t mean you won’t care about how you present yourself (cue: closet scene).  It does mean that caring about how you look won’t paralyze you any more.   I’m at peace with my body is how I answer people’s questions.  And here is what I mean by that:   My body’s not as strong as I’d like for it to be and it’s not as picture-perfect as some bodies are, but the truth is that it responds to what I ask of it, it allows me to delight in life and has never betrayed me.  That is not to say that I have never, in the past, wished that it looked different.  There have been those times. What I mean by saying that it has never betrayed me is that it has gotten me through everything I have asked of it—100+ plus mile bike rides, long hikes, night times spent patrolling a beach in Trinidad to protect leatherback turtles, accompanying my father through chemotherapy treatment for an advanced lymphoma five years ago, waking for every wailing episode of my son’s infancy and then sustaining me through the next day in a way that allowed me to appropriately mother despite the lack of sleep.  My body has done everything I have asked of it, and, for a long time, it did it with very little gratitude from me (in fact, I often betrayed it).  When I think about how unkind I have been with my thoughts toward my body while it has simultaneously been so kind to my soul with all that it has allowed me to accomplish, I am humbled.  I wish to not ever be that unkind to the vessel that I’ve been given to enjoy and experience this life again.  So, that’s the promise I made to my body years ago.  You’ve been good to me.  I will be good, in all of its manifestations, back.

“What was it that got you to that place?” The tv reporter asked.

And the truth is that finding my passion did.  Right after college, I taught at a high school that I loved and it was a place where I was needed.  I adored my students, I poured myself into them, and, truth be told, I realized that I could do good, meaningful, life-affirming work (and I mean work not just like go to work 9 to 5 work but work like resonates with your soul could be volunteering or how you interact with your own children work) and the way I looked didn’t make it any more good, meaningful, and life affirming.  I also realized that for every minute I spent absorbed in how I look, that was time where I wasn’t figuring out my kids’ needs, reading to make myself a better teacher, enjoying life to give balance to the hard work of teaching and coaching.  So, I started giving less priority to the way I looked and more to the way I felt about what I was doing in the world.  Finding my passion- that what I love to do is to help people authentically engage their lives and deliberately choose futures of their own imaginings; helping people realize that life doesn’t have to happen to them.  They can make life happen- changed everything for me when it came to being body obsessed.  I didn’t have the time and energy to be so body-obsessed because I wanted that time and energy for something else.

Now, back to that closet scene on Monday morning.  All weekend, I had one idea in mind of what I would wear on Monday.  And when I was putting it on, I wasn’t feeling it.  The suit- which is this funky, nontraditional outfit that I  love- is brown, and I think it just came across as too drab on what was promising to be a gorgeous spring day.  I wanted to wear something else.  I looked at the clock and made a commitment.  You get ten minutes to figure this out, I told myself.  And so I hurried.  First, I threw on a dress, but it seemed too casual.  My eyes darted to this bright top that I love and wear year round with dark jeans.  I pulled it on.  And then I pulled on three different dark jeans to see which one looked most professional.  And then I thought, I can’t wear jeans.  And so then it became the battle of the black pants.  The black pants I had on when the clock hit ten minutes is what stayed on.  It may not have been the perfect match for the shirt, but it allowed me to follow the parameters that I had set for myself.

Here’s the thing about how we look.  It’s not a problem to care about the way you project yourself.  The problem comes when you care so much that you paralyze yourself- you can’t get out of the closet, you can think about nothing else than how you look when you are at a birthday party for a friend, you say No to an invitation that you would actually love to enjoy because you have a bad haircut, a pimple, allergy face, you’ve gained weight.  It’s when we quit living our lives, quit fully investing ourselves in taking pleasure, are unable to offer our gifts to the world that we’ve hit a major snag that needs fixing.

Body peace.  It doesn’t mean that everything’s easy or that you feel you get everything right.  Last night, I watched the clip from my interview.  I had on way too much blush.  I forgot that I  flush when I’m on television and so I didn’t really need to put on blush, and I had put on my normal amount.  I made that observation for next time and just moved on.  And that is what body peace means: you move past the dis-ease with reason and know that life is about what you experience and offer, not just how you look doing it.

*originally posted on March 22, 2011

A simple, special, extraordinary moment.

A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

Image from Pinterest

Today you will find me over at Voxxi talking about photo retouching, beauty, perfection, and imperfection.

Here is a brief excerpt from  You are beautiful just the way you are:

There is no perfect, and, more importantly, there is no imperfect.  We were all created just as we were meant to be- with our wild curly hair or the family nose or full breasts or flat bottom or high cheekbones or prominent chin.  We are perfect in our uniqueness.  We are meant for uniqueness.”

Hope you’ll check out the post and share it if you are so inclined!

I am honored today to introduce you to Kaleigh Somers who founded of HUGstronger to help empower college students and reassure them that they are not alone in their struggles, be those personal, professional, academic, or athletic, she developed HUGstronger, a content-driven blog community that operates on the belief that honest, authentic storytelling can change the world. The site categorizes posts into relationship struggles, being away from home, health issues, fitting in, academics, and letters to undergraduates in the same field of study.  Kaleigh thought that my blog readers might enjoy knowing about and sharing in the HUGstronger journey.  I couldn’t have agreed more so I asked her to guest post today.  Enjoy (and then go check out HUGstronger)!

I am a project lover.

I am betting those are no radical words for a woman with a heart the size of Texas. Because for me, and you, and thousands of our closest friends, projects are not just a way to fill the crevices of time between grocery shopping and snuggling up for a movie on a Sunday night. They are a chance to change something big and radical and fundamental.

Committing yourself to a project is much better than, say, committing to spending an hour toiling over a quilt you’ll never finish or a half-finished scrapbook you’ll shove under your bed for years.

The minute the quilt and the scrapbook and tackling the living room wallpaper become a project, it gets a little extra punch packed into it.

Don’t you think?

Me too.

That’s why I spent ten months scraping the insides of my brain for a project that would last beyond my initial motivation to make something better.

In two months, I’ll tuck my college paraphernalia in cardboard boxes and plastic Rubbermaid containers and haul all of it out to my car for one last time. One last travel between the home that holds my heartbeat in its palm and the one I hung onto for four years, between brushing away tears of laughter and joy.

That’s where my story began: a lonely, quiet girl who learned, through years of blogging to better the lives of women around the world, that you must stop standing in place and yapping.

You must take your heart and let it pulse through your fingertips and create something magical. My something magical was HUGstronger, a website launched at beginning of 2012 to create a community of voices around the college experience.

Because let’s face it—it’s not like the movies.

There are boys who don’t want to commit to something past tonight and girls who haven’t outgrown high school power trips and siblings who forget to call and check in every once in a while. There are periods of depression and eating disorders and panic attacks and alcoholism. Every ounce of self-doubt seems to magnify on that campus.

I have a feeling you’ve been there. You’ve stood on the edge of a cliff and looked down at the world below, wondering how control slipped away from you.

I created HUGstronger to change that. To give girls a voice when they felt alone and sure they were the only ones tucking their problems behind their headboards and brushing away tears in loud shower stalls.

And I hope you’ll join us. Enter the conversation. Break the barrier between the things we don’t talk about and the safe topics.

Whether you’re in college or graduated four decades ago, I hope you’ll help us piece together a world where women don’t have to accept the pain and heartbreak. A world where hope is lurking just behind the next corner.

We believe storytelling can change the world. I hope you do too.

Links – http://www.twitter.com/kaleighsomers and http://www.twitter.com/hugstronger

http://www.hugstronger.com, http://www.facebook.com/hugstronger

One recent workshop participant said:

image found on Pinterest

beautiful you BLAST: a workshop to bring you back to your brilliance

March 1, 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM, Dowd YMCA in Charlotte, North Carolina

As a child, you felt comfortable in your skin. Your body was your instrument, an extension of your unique mind and soul. It took you where you were going, expressed what you felt, got things done. But then, somewhere on your way to adulthood, something shifted. Your sense of your brilliance faded.

In beautiful you BLAST, you will be introduced to a new way of thinking about beauty, bodies, the messages we’re sold, and your personal possibility. You’ll gain insight on how and why we are manipulated to buy into beauty ideals and clarity on why and how you can set yourself free from that thinking and begin to live a life that is designed with your true self and the gifts you have in mind. beautiful you BLAST will empower you to see beauty in a way that is true to who you are and not in the way the world hands it to you.

Equinox: a creativity experience

March 24, 8:30 am until 12:30 pm, Triple Play Farm in Davidson, North Carolina

Are you hungry for a moment of creating in the midst of all the doing and being that your life demands of you? Are you looking for a creative challenge that will gently stretch your abilities while opening you up to your possibilities? Do you just want time and permission to explore with horses, consider nature, paint, write, draw, or capture images without any expectation and without worrying about the set-up or clean-up? If so, then join us for Equinox, a creativity retreat designed to feed your creativity and foster your awareness of your creative process. Combining equine facilitated learning activities with lightly guided, self-propelled creative time, Equinox participants will experience the sensory and intellectually stimulating process of working with and learning from horses and the absorbing and satisfying experience of creating.  Only eight spots remain.

Unbridled Authenticity 

April 21, 8:30 am until 12 pm, Triple Play Farm in Davidson, North Carolina

Want to be deliberate about 2012? Want to intentionally create the life that you have imagined? Then this retreat is just the right experience for you. Joining equine assisted learning with reflection activities, six participants will playfully and thoughtfully consider what they bring into their lives through horse work and reflection. Only one spot remains in our April experience.

photo by Jill E. Williams

As has become tradition here on the blog, every Valentine’s Day, I tell the same story.  It’s the story of one of the biggest fights in my marriage to BF.  And though it seems like it is about a cupcake, I cannot stress enough that it is NOT about the cupcake:

This is the funny thing about our marriage.  BF and I are about as different as two people can be.  I mean, we are seriously different.  But this has worked to our advantage because it means we have to communicate and compromise about everything.  Anyway, because of our differences, we know that we’re not going to feel the same about most things, and so we just go into every discussion knowing that there will be lots of communication until we get to the other side.  Since we don’t expect to see eye to eye on everything, we rarely fight.  Except when BF takes something that is mine. Without asking.  Because I just think that is disrespectful.

The most common thing I don’t want to share without being asked is my dessert.  Not because I want the sugar so badly (okay, maybe a little bit is that), I swear, but just because I think you shouldn’t take something that is not yours.  It would be one thing if he asked.  It would be another thing if I didn’t ALWAYS say, “I have a cookie in there I really want to eat, please don’t eat it.”  But I always do, and he never listens.

It’s enough to drive a woman who once won a Holly Hobby cake in a raffle as a four year old but was sick the day it came home and her family devoured it without saving her a piece bonkers.  No, there are no issues here.  Move along.  I just want to explain that my territorialness about sugar, I mean asking, has deep roots.  And I am forthright about it.  You’d think a boy would learn. But he hasn’t.  Or maybe he has, because just last week there was a mini-sugar situation in our house.  But this time BF didn’t eat my cookie (I made him his own set of cookies as a surprise and just asked to have one that I sealed away in aluminum foil for later), he threw it away.  And we survived it, and everyone went to bed happy at our house (or maybe I’ve just learned that there is no guarantee that one will enjoy any sugary goodness that lands in our house).  Unlike Valentine’s Day 2007.  Speaking of Valentine’s Day, happy day, BF.  I wouldn’t trade you for the world.  Or even a cupcake which I know is kinda hard to believe.

Here we go:

I love cake.  Grocery store cake to be specific.  Give me some grocery store vanilla cake with vanilla icing and you have a girl who doesn’t need any other sustenance.

Anyway, for Valentine’s Day 2007, BF’s aunt gave us two cupcakes.  Grocery store cupcakes.  With a lot of icing.  I was so psyched about the cupcake that in the car, on the way home from dinner at his aunt’s house, I was talking about when I was going to eat my cupcake.  Yes, I am simple; I don’t play otherwise.  I know this about myself, but, here is the thing, I don’t ever get grocery store cake or cupcakes and so a little part of me was dancing inside from the rare impending sugar rush.

BF looked at me nonchalantly and said, “You can have my cupcake.”

“Are you kidding me,”  I asked.  “Because if you are, that is just cruel.”

“I am not kidding you,” he answered.  “I don’t need to be eating that.”  He actually said that line with a hint of self-satisfaction, as if he were mature enough to rise above the cupcake trance that I was so clearly in. But I ignored him because I knew that I needed the cupcake– both cupcakes.  Whatever, dude, be self-righteous.  I just want the cupcakes.

So I started planning, aloud in the car, when I would eat each cupcake.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,”  I exclaimed, as if he had given me something gold and shiny.  But this was better than gold and shiny.  Sugar is my gold and shiny.

Back home, I dropped my cupcakes off in the kitchen and then retreated to my office to work on whatever deadline I had approaching, and BF went to bed.  Finally at a good stopping place a couple hours later, I walked through the kitchen on the way to our bedroom.  My eyes darted to the cupcakes that I had so lovingly wrapped in tin foil.  Panic struck.  Even through the tin foil, I could see that one of the cupcakes was missing.  I opened up the foil.  Just one cupcake looked back.

Mercury rose through my spine.  I marched into the bedroom and noisily opened my dresser drawer, stomped my way into the bathroom, threw on every light, hummed my way through my bedtime routine until BF woke up with a jump.

“What?”  He asked, as he always does when he is aroused out of a deep sleep (except for that one time I elbowed him to wake up his snoring self at the NUTCRACKER and he said something very different and not appropriate for the Nutcracker audience.  We have not returned to the Nutcracker.).

I turned to him, put my hands on my hips, and said “I can’t believe you would do something so tacky as to eat my cupcake without asking.”

”It was my cupcake,” he tried to reason.

“No it was not,”  I said.  “And that doesn’t matter because this is not about the cupcake.”

“It is too about the cupcake,” he insisted.

“It is not.  This is about you offering me something and then regretting the offering and rather than coming to ask me if you could have it back like an adult, you just did what you wanted.  That is no way to be in a partnership,”  I sneered.

“You’re just mad that I ate MY cupcake,” he volleyed.  “This is not about the cupcake,” I fumed and ranted and raved until we both just went to sleep.  And I promise it wasn’t about the cupcakes.  It was about what eating my cupcake without asking symbolized.  I promise.

In the morning, he looked at me when I hopped out of bed.  “I am sorry that I ate your cupcake,”  he offered.

“It’s not about you eating the cupcake,” I tried again.  “Don’t you get that?”

“Yeah, I do,”  he answered before leaving for work.  But I wondered all day if he really did get it.  Sure, I love cake, and I love the anticipation of cake.  But I also love sharing things I love with people that I love, and I would have been happy to give the cupcake back if he had just asked.  That night, he walked into the house with a six pack of grocery store cupcakes.

“What’s that?”  I honed in, my cake-dar on high.

“A peace offering,”  he answered.  “Now, you have five cupcakes all to yourself.”

I did a double take, clearly counting six cupcakes in the container.  “But there are six cupcakes,” the greedy little cake hoarder in me said.

“And one of them is mine,”  he smiled before walking into the kitchen, opening the case, and savoring his cupcake.

Have you ever had a fight with your partner that wasn’t really about the issue at hand?  Is there a past fraught story in your relationship that’s now taken a comic turn?

Image from Pinterest

Today, you can find me over at the Charlotte Observer where I share my thoughts on enjoying life now.  Have you ever said you need to wait to do something until you weighed less, had a degree, got married, etc?  What if you didn’t wait?  What if you just went for it?  That’s what we’re talking about over at the Observer.

An excerpt:

Magic happens when we let it, when we invite it to happen, when our heart is open to it. We are meant to enjoy the daily-ness of our existence, to root ourselves in this eternal truth. It is not the accolades or ceremonies that define our life and give it all of its value. The journey itself is the magic of our existence. The journey is the goal.

A simple, special, extraordinary moment.

A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.