Live Your Life…Live Your Life
As my son leaves for a service academy, I reflect on some advice from children’s author, Maurice Sendak
The past few months have marked a time of change in ways that have taken me by surprise and also some I knew were coming. My life isn’t much different in the bird’s eye view of the day to day, but the texture of my days and routines have shifted in ways significant to me.
I wrote in January about my longtime client, Annie, who died at 48-years old after two years dealing with and fighting a stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis. After her death, I quickly signed up for a “retreat” with Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, who writes and teaches from Gampo Abbey in Canada. The class/retreat, titled, “The Sacred Journey: Living Purposefully and Dying Fearlessly,” was promoted within the week of Annie’s death and the confluence of those things spurred me to go ahead and take on the challenge of the six weeks of class and meditation that I really didn’t know if I had time for.
During those weeks, I woke every morning and barely wrote (my normal morning ritual), but signed into my online teaching and reading. Spending a couple hours, 5–7 days a week doing anything new creates an intensity — which I definitely felt.
