Today is a Great Day to Experience Every Moment of Life

Many times, we give significance to days of the week.  We hate Mondays.  Wednesday is Hump Day.  We Thank God It’s Friday! We live for the weekend. But every day is a great day to celebrate.  Regardless of the day of the week.  Regardless of the day’s schedule.  Regardless of whether it is a holiday or not.  Every day is a great day to experience life to the fullest.  We should truly seize the day!

We often associate the Carpe Diem sentiment with doing something magnanimous.  We will often discount the significance of our life by the deficit of doing “big things.”  I know that I used to subscribe to the notion that I needed to do “big things” in order to truly experience life.  I put a lot of energy and money into ensuring that I created the most spectacular of spectacular events for everything I did.  My children’s birthday parties were great productions.  My birthday parties were grand and fabulous.  My work in my career and in my community were always full throttle pursuits of excellence.  Immediately, my focus was on how to make this “bigger.” I got great results.  I got great accolades.  I felt great about my big accomplishments.

Life had a way of shaking things up and moving me in big ways.  I was literally moved from my comfort zone.  My first husband got a new job in another city and I literally left the life I had built behind.  That move was the first of two major moves that reshaped my life and created new opportunities and experiences.  Perhaps I would have learned to appreciate the beauty of creating great moments every day if I had stayed put.  But being ripped of everything familiar enabled me to earn greater appreciation for creating new experiences.  I earned this appreciation in retrospect, however.

A friend gave me a book for Christmas that helped me to truly reflect on whether I was truly experiencing the power of the moments given to me.  Duly named, The Power Of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, this book helped me to reframe how I viewed the previously quipped “series of unfortunate events” that had plagued my life.  I came to realize that these events were not unfortunate at all, but merely things that had not gone as planned, but had gone exactly as they should.  The full breadth of that realization is the subject of another writing, but is the underlying theme of this Carpe Diem message.

I love to read and try to read at least one book a week.  I record my impressions from my readings in my Book of Thoughts, a series of notebooks especially for this purpose.  I have been doing this for about 10 years.  About seven years ago, I decided to turn my Book of Thoughts into a Book of Actions by committing to creating action items from what I’ve learned and actually make my knowledge powerful.  One of my Takeaways from The Power of Moments was to truly become conscious of the moments I was creating…and the moments I was missing.  I decided that I need to have better more meaningful experiences.

Some of the most beautiful moments happen between the “big things” we do.  In fact, every day is full of beautiful moments.  Some happen on their own.  Others happen when we commit to having them.  I have stopped having bad days.  I have stopped have bad relationships.  I have stopped having bad experiences.  Instead I have begun to have powerful moments that create great lessons, great reasons to be grateful, and great experiences.  When my relationships yield far more lessons than blessings, I end them focus on the relationships that add more value to my life than they take away.  I have let go of the commitment to completion when I find that the activity or organization no longer adds value nor I to it.  I am focused on being mindful of the experiences that I am creating.  If it no longer serves me in this season, I let the season evolve to the next.

I truly believe that it is all working together for my good.  Every single day.  There is something beautiful to be gained from everything we do.  Even those series of unfortunate events that we’d much rather avoid.  Sometimes we get so focused on the unfortunate so much that we miss the fortunate.  I remember a speaker asking the audience to describe a catastrophe that they had experienced in their life that they hadn’t survived.  After a pregnant pause, we all erupted in acknowledgement that despite the pain, disappointment, tragedy, or even violence that we had experienced, we had survived them all.  And that is the fortune in every unfortunate event!

The truth is our life is a series of moments.  Are we truly experiencing life or are we just wasting precious moments?  Are we focused on the wrong things?  Are we ignoring the beauty because it is dusted in ugliness?  Are we discounting the small but powerful moment waiting on the big bodacious one?  Every moment is one to be relished.  Whether it is the one you wish for or the one that was forced upon you.  Every moment is powerful.

I have committed to being truly focused on looking for and appreciating the powerful moments in my life.  I have come to believe that nothing in life happens by chance.  We are where we are in our lives because there is something good to be gained from that moment.  Whether we seize it or miss it is totally up to us.

Today is the day to experience every moment of life.  Don’t wait until someday.  Don’t wait until a special day.  Don’t wait until Friday.  Experience every day for the fortune that is in it. Appreciate the power in every moment.  Be grateful for what went right.  Be grateful for the lesson learned from what did not go right.  Be grateful to have survived another day to create another experience.  In all things, be grateful. 

The 7 Year Itch Revisited

The therapist I saw after my divorce told me that I should forgo being in a relationship for every 3 years that I was married.

I was married for 21 years. 

That meant 7 years.

Shiiiiiit!

I had given 22 years to my first husband.  I was not about to give him another 7.  Hell naw to the naw, naw, naw!

I politely shared that I agreed that I should not rush into another relationship, but I did not agree with a mechanical determination of when I should find love again.  It was less elegantly stated than that, but much more elegant that what I was thinking.

Love is a matter of the heart.  How can it be dictated by a formula?

I don’t believe in boxes.  I don’t believe in self-imposed limitations.  Instead of subscribing to some formula for when I could love again, I committed to healing myself and allowing love to happen as it should.

Immediately after my separation, I became obsessed with finding a boyfriend.  Ob-sessed.  I needed to fill the void of my lost love.  I signed up for match.com.  I pored endlessly over “great” matches that were anything but.  The algorithms rarely yielded anyone who was even remotely a good match, but I kept on looking. 

I connected with a guy who lived out-of-town.  He seemed really cool and had great potential.  We talked on the phone every once in awhile.  Although I was acting out of desperation and looking for love in the wrong place, I was not completely stupid.  I’ve seen enough catfish episodes to know better.  I began to ask questions.  Things did not add up.  He was supposedly a successful real estate agent in a Southern metropolis.  I called up an agent I knew in the area under the guise of scouting out a potential client, and she confirmed that he was not as successful as he said he was.  I investigated further and found his facebook page.  He still had pics of him and a woman, presumably his girlfriend or wife, as his profile.  He put a nail in his own coffin when he called me while I was out one night.  I told him I was having a cigar and a drink at my favorite spot and he angrily asked if there was anyone there with me.  First of all, if I were with someone I would not have answered the phone.  Second of all, blown self-esteem or not, I was not the one to be checked like that.  So that was the end of that “relationship.”

I should have gotten off of match.com after that but I didn’t.  I eventually met someone else.  He was actually truthful in his bio and otherwise normal.  He was still out of town.  We talked on the phone regularly and had otherwise normal interactions.  He had a good spirit.  He made me laugh.  He had great conversation.  We had similar entrepreneurial aspirations, so we talked about business stuff too.  It was otherwise progressing to be something more than talking on the phone.  I was on my way to a business trip and arranged to meet him at a Starbucks.  We had facetimed a couple of times so I knew that he should be an actual real person.  We met up for coffee and it was a great little coffee date. 

Our relationship continued to blossom long-distance and probably would have continued if my first husband and I had not gotten back together.  Like Erykah Badu, I’m not enough woman to divide the pie, so I broke up with my boyfriend to go back to my husband. 

We eventually reconnected after the marriage was over for good, but it never really rekindled.  I am grateful for our connection.  He helped me to reawaken.  He helped me to find my muse again.  I wrote poetry for the first time in years.  He brought me laughter and joy.  I have no regrets. He was a great match.  I did get off of match.com after that tho.  I ended up being matched up with my son’s lacrosse coach and that was a little too freaky for me so I closed my account and decided to find dates the old-fashioned way.

I also decided to not engage in any more “serious” relationships because I was not ready.  While I still did not think I needed to wait 7 years, I knew that it was not really healthy for me to be in a serious relationship.  I sought out “love” on match.com purely out of a need to fill a void.  I needed someone to want me.  I needed someone to find me attractive.  I needed someone to make me feel good about myself. I needed someone to do for me what I needed to do for myself.

The truth is no match could ever fill that void.  Only I could.  And that was the wisdom of the seven years advice.

It is wise to wait after a breakup before beginning a new relationship.  Healing heart break takes the time it takes.  It could be 30 days.  I could be 6 months.  I could be a year.  But it should not take seven years. 

The most important thing to do after a breakup is to discover and rediscover you.  How can you give of yourself to someone in love if you don’t know who she is?  I truly believe that the more you know who you are, the better you’ll be for someone else. 

I made a decision 30 days after my marriage ended (the first time) that I deserved to love again.  I knew that it would not be overnight.  I knew that I would have some hiccups.  But I knew that it would happen.

I healed myself from marriage in about 30 days.  We got back together for about 3 ½ months—and broke up.  Then we got back together for about 3 days—and broke up again.  The third time was not a charm, so it produced a great deal of anger that took me about 3 months to process.  But once I let that go, I let that go. 

I then spent another year working on me.  I had a lot of fun dating during that year and remained committed that I was NOT looking for a husband so I was NOT looking for anything serious.  That approach had its benefits and complications that is a conversation for another day. 

The point is I took the time I needed to work on me so that when love came looking for me, I would be ready to receive it.  It took some time.  It did not take seven years.  But love did find me.  I believe that it did because I decided that it would. 

I believe that love finds you when you look like love, feel like love, and love yourself.  That takes the time it takes.  There is no true formula or prescription or algorithm.  There is the moment when you look in the mirror and you love who you see and you know that you are worthy of love and deserve to experience it.

Be open to love and it will reveal itself to you.  Don’t look for it or you may miss it.  Just be open to experiencing it and you will.  And trust yourself when you see it. It is not too good to be true.  Just be open. 

My Marriage Was Not a Mistake

My Dad and I were talking the other day and he was trying to comfort me about a recent challenge.  In passing he called the end of my marriage a mistake.  He was trying to make me feel better for the mistake I made. And I stopped the conversation to dispel the mischaracterization and reframe the truth. I’ve made many mistakes in my life.  My marriage was not one of them.  I made choices.  I made sacrifices.  I made the best of it that I could.  But I did not make a mistake. 

And neither did he. 

I will not dishonor the life we had together by reducing it to a mistake.  We built a life together.  We created life together.  We experienced life together.  Through the ups and the downs, we did it together.  And I will not dishonor that by calling it a mistake. 

While the choices we made were not always the best, they were choices.  We “fell in love,” but the evolution of our marriage was not an accident.  We pieced it together day by day, month by month, year by year.  The fact that my marriage did not last does not castigate it as a mistake. 

It is not mere nomenclature.  It is a realization that sometimes life does not go as planned, but it always goes as it should.  I have no regrets that I did not end my marriage earlier than it died.  I have no regrets that I did not say to hell with it when it was obvious to me that there were fatal flaws in who we were that ultimately led to the demise of us.   

My marriage had a purpose.  It was intentional.  The best and highest purpose of my marriage was the birth of my sons.  I am grateful for them.  I am grateful that they are the best of us.  I will not let them believe or let anyone else make it seem that they were born from a mistake. 

I am accountable for the birth, life and death of my marriage.  I do not say that to mean that I bear 100% responsibility or I caused it or I am to blame for it or it is my fault.  I am accountable for my marriage because it was my choice.  It was my choice to enter it.  It was my choice to stay in it.  It was my choice to let it go when the choice was presented to me.   

I choose to see my marriage as a beautiful chapter in my life.  It had good parts and bad parts.  It had happy days and f**ked up days.  I can choose to focus on all that went wrong or I can choose to focus on what went right.   

I have learned much from my marriage that did not last.  It was not a failure.  It was not a mistake. It was not a tragedy.  It is a marriage that did not last.  It ran its course and when its purpose was fulfilled, it ended.  And I find beauty in that. 

We must be careful to control the narrative about the lives we live.  We cannot others define for us and shape how we feel.  We definitely cannot allow others’ characterizations define who we were, what we experienced, and who we are.  We make mistakes.  We are not mistakes.  We make mistakes in our marriages and in our relationships.  We do not become them. 

I believe in the power of words.  Words represent thoughts.  Thoughts are the predecessors of our reality.  Choose the words you use to characterize your marriage, your relationship, your love, and you—in every stage—its birth, its life, and its transformation.  There is something beautiful in each stage.  There is something beautiful in everything that ends.  Sometimes it is minuscule.  Embrace the molecular beauty.  Most times, it is quite plentiful.  Embrace the aggregate beauty. 

While I do not forget the painful moments, I do not allow the pain to paint the picture of my marriage.  I choose the paint what was in the promise that it tried to fulfilled.  We tried.  We were not successful. And yet we were. 

Instead of transcending and continuing as one, we transformed and became two. And there was no mistake in the path that led us to the new place that we are now.  And the new life that lies before us.  We are not our mistakes.  We were not a mistake.  We were the love story that ended and became something new.  

Today I Renamed My Ex-Husband and Freed Myself

I have called him by many names since our divorce.  Some of them are expletive filled and not best shared here.  But the name I have assigned to him today is the most beautiful.

When I first met him, I called him by the wrong name.  His name was pronounced differently by others than how it should be and he never corrected anyone.  The first five years that I knew him I mispronounced his name.  It was not until I met his mother that I learned his real name.  It was also the first time that I saw him as my love.  We were on a college French class field trip in New Orleans and his family hosted a dinner for the students.  I find intellect to be extremely sexy and became enthralled with him when he began to do his school work while everyone else was chilling out at his home.  I admired his focus.  I became enamored with his mind.  The next day I saw him in the sunlight in the French Quarters and knew that I wanted to call him my husband.

And for 21 years, I called him my husband.  He was my Butterfly.  Beautiful to me in all his stages.  And when life called on him to fly away from me, his name began to change.

I remember the first time that I had to refer to him as something other than my husband.  We were still married, but newly separated.  I did not feel right calling him my husband because he did not want to be married to me any more.  But he was still my husband in my heart and legally we were still married.  I remember the torment of having to come up with something to call him in a conversation after we separated.  He was not my ex-husband because we were not divorced.  I remember the awkwardness of trying to come with something and don't really remember what I came up with.  I eventually began to refer to him as my children's father.

For the months that followed our separation, I chose to see him in the light of the most important role he became in my life.  The father of my children.  Seeing him in that light kept me from calling him a motherf****r in public when my anger was at its height.  I would not dishonor him because I did not want to dishonor them.  I really wanted to call him a motherf****r, but it was best to call him in the best and highest light.

After our divorce was final and he was truly my ex-husband, I didn't really like that word.  It sounded so cold.  Despite the tragedy of the end of our marriage, it was a great love story.  To reduce him to an ex when he was still a huge part of my life did not sound right.  So I continued calling him my sons' father.  But that made him sound like a baby daddy.  And that didn't really sound right either.  When writing, I would often refer to him as my then-husband when writing.  But that sounded kinda weird.

So I continued to struggle with what to call him and began to just call him by his first name.  People who knew him knew who I was talking about.  People who didn't would ask who he was.  And then I would have to decide whether to call him my ex-husband or my son's father.  

But today, I finally decided who he is in my life.  The role fits perfectly.  It represents who he is and who he was to me.  He is my first husband.

He is my first husband.

He is my first husband because he will not be my last.  He is my first husband because I have found love again.  But he was my first husband before I did.  He is my first husband because our marriage ended but did not cut off the possibility of marriage for me.  I will marry again one day.  In honor of that possibility and as affirmation of  that promise, he is my first husband.

Woman, Thou Art Loosed!

One of the most powerful moments in your life is when you realize that the breakup you thought was the end of your life is truly the release that created the ability to have the life you were truly meant to live!  I used to lament the end of my marriage as a huge failure in my life.  And certainly there were many personal shortcomings that contributed to my marriage not working.  I own that.  I learned from that. Most importantly, I released that!  I released myself from my past so that I could create a beautiful future.  I did an assessment of what I did “wrong” and reframed them into what I could do “right” to be a better partner in a relationship.  I am more cognizant of what I can control—my behaviors and actions—so that I can be better for me and better for the one I love. 

Far too often we hold onto our past and allow it to rob us of our future.  I was listening to the Redefining Wealth podcast by Patrice Washington, America’s Money Maven, and she dropped a nugget of wisdom that reminded me of the power of release.  She wisely noted, “Forgiveness is giving up the possibility of a better past.”  Bam! 

Can you create a better past?

Nope!

You cannot go back and make your past go the way you wanted it to go.  You cannot go back and make him love you the way you wish he had.  You cannot go back and love him differently than you did.  You cannot go back and create a better marriage, relationship or life.  You. Cannot. Go. Back!

You can learn from the past and create a better future. 

Releasing yourself from the past will open you up to all the possibilities of the future.  Releasing yourself from the power of your memories will create a superpower of shaping your future.  Releasing yourself from the devastation of your breakup empowers you to have a beautiful future. Your past will either entrap you or release you.  Decide to be released!

What do you need to release today? 

The present is time to create the future you desire, deserve, and deliver yourself!

Today, I challenge you to create a Release Agreement.

Here’s a template to begin this powerful process:

My name is _____________________ and I release myself from my past so I can create the future I deserve.

I release myself from feeling __________

I release myself from the fear that  __________.

I release my anger about ________.

I release the hurt that ________ caused me.
I release myself from the hurt that I caused.

I release myself from the disappointment that _______________.

I release myself from ______

Signed __________________

Dated: _____________

Once you create your release agreement, print it out and post it on your mirror and say it aloud everyday until you feel the freedom of the power of your words and live them everyday in your spirit.

Woman, thou art loosed!