What I’m practicing today

Happy Sacred Sunday!

Today I’m taking my mother and my family to the Keys for Mother’s Day.

On the surface, this looks like the kind of trip you’d long for. Sunshine, family, a beautiful drive, the highlight reel of a fun Sunday.

But in reality, going on this trip wasn’t an easy decision to make.

My sister is having open heart surgery on Thursday. And the truth is, all of us are bracing for it. My mother. My brother. My sister. My family. Me. It’s human nature to worry, to brace, to live in the future when something hard is coming. 

My mom feels it most acutely because she’s the mother, she’s seventy-seven years old, and worry has always been one of the ways she shows love. Her instinct, and honestly all of our instincts, is to stay home and wait. Pause life. Hold our breath until Thursday.

I understand that pull. But I’ve learned something over the years that I keep coming back to:

When you sit and wait for good things to happen, you live in frustration. You spend your life waiting for happiness to come … when. 

Similarly, when you sit and wait for bad things to happen, you live in suffering. And as Seneca reminds us, we often suffer more in imagination than in reality. 

In both scenarios, the day in front of us, the only one you actually have, slips by. 

Going to the Keys today is a proactive choice. Choosing to leave the house, get in the car, and have a beautiful day in spite of what’s coming on Thursday is the harder thing. And it’s the thing I want to practice.

Because every hard moment is a rehearsal. You are practicing who you are becoming. Whatever you do today is what you reinforce.

I learned this from two experiences in my life. .

When I was in college, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer and traveled to Atlanta for an experimental radiation treatment. I drove up to be with him for the first round. We walked out of the clinic on a Friday morning, and the doctor told him the symptoms would probably hit within twenty-four hours.

My dad turned to me and said, “Do you want to go to Six Flags?”

I looked at him like he had lost his mind. We were the for his cancer treatment! He said, “Tomorrow I might feel awful. But I feel fine today. So let’s enjoy it!”

So we went. We rode roller coasters all afternoon, stopped at White Castle on the way back, and ate burgers in the hotel room laughing until we fell asleep. It is still one of my most cherished memories with him.

The least memorable thing about that trip is that we were there for cancer.

That was the beginning of a seventeen-year battle with three different cancers. What I’ve realized, looking back, is that we lived seventeen beautiful years in spite of cancer instead of letting cancer dominate those seventeen years. My dad taught me how to live in the in the middle of the wait. 

I think about my best friends, Betsy & Alain, too.

A few years ago, their daughter died when she was just 2 years and 9 months old.  Just a couple of weeks later, their son turned one. They had already planned his first birthday party, a sweet little gathering at a play gym. 

When Fofi died, they had to decide whether to go through with that party.

The easy decision would have been to cancel. Nobody would have judged them. Nobody expects a grieving mother and father to throw a birthday party. Their baby was only turning one. He wouldn’t even remember.

But they went ahead with the party.

Because they had made a choice. They had decided they were going to be happy again one day. They had decided they were going to keep living for the children they still had. And they understood something most people don’t want to face:

If you wait until you feel ready to be happy again, you might sit in that misery forever.

You have to practice becoming the person you want to be, even when that version of you hasn’t arrived yet. Especially then.

So today we are choosing to make it a beautiful day. Not because these are the best of times … but rather because this is the only time we actually have.

And that brings me to you: What are you not enjoying today because you’re too focused on the future?

May today be a gentle reminder that a happy life isn’t something you achieve, it’s a choice you make. 

Sending you so much love today and always,

P.S. Every Mother’s Day, I pull out a little box from my closet that holds every card and drawing my boys have ever made me. I display them all over the living room. I read them. I look at them. And then I put them away until next year.

Marie Kondo taught me that the things you keep are meant to bring you joy, and if you don’t enjoy them, then they are not fulfilling their purpose. So I refuse to keep these cards locked in a box where they fulfill nothing. Once a year, I let them do their job. I get to relive every season of their childhood, even the seasons that have already passed. It is one of my favorite rituals of the year.

P.P.S. This week’s podcast I’m sharing lessons learned in my own motherhood journey and how it led me to entrepreneurship … and then became the comfort zone that kept me from proactively pursuing my dreams.  In many ways, it’s the same lesson as the one from this email. If we wait for when, we miss what is now … and that’s how we drift. Tune in here.