Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Trust30, day 1: 15 Minutes To Live


#Trust30 is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself. Use this as an opportunity to reflect on your now, and to create direction for your future. 30 prompts from inspiring thought-leaders will guide you on your writing journey

"We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

It's been a good life.

When I got here, I had feelings of abandonment, betrayal, intense hurt.

Now, and for some time, I've had a much better idea of what this has been all about.

I chose this; I did it all.

I wanted to know, to REALLY know and to learn at a level that is as close as one's breath and this is what I've had. And now as I wind down, with a mere 13 minutes left, I choose to call this "good."

Why? Simply because I really have captured the dream of this life that has been my life. I can't tell you in hard core evidence that I have "proof" that I can lay out and demonstrate to others. That would be important if and only if I needed to be right.

To be honest, there HAVE been times that I have SO wanted to be "right." Now I don't even know how to define what being right means. It's like trying to hit a constantly changing, ever shifting target. It is exhausting and fruitless except that it gives one an example to contrast against, to compare to.

I've been upset with myself in the past why I didn't do this, achieve that, accomplish the other... and it's all been part of a story; one that I was born into, one that I attracted and one that I help author and further along during this life. Wow, it has truly been "a trip," and it didn't take travels to Tibet, Nepal, Hawaii or anywhere else to make it all happen.

It was all inside. It was a choice, over and over again.

"All is choice." You shared that with me long ago (or so it seems,) and now with but eight minutes to go, I still exercise that choice now as I write this missive (great word!) The choice, eternal and constant, fueled everything that did, re-did or un-did events and understandings. I know I hurt some people. Others I made happy.

But I think that those meetings and the resultant happiness or unhappiness on each of our parts were again, nothing but choices. The power in those choices make up the life that we create and I DO know beyond any doubt that indeed, we DO create our own lives and far more powerfully and insidiously that we may have ever suspected. We are that powerful.

Four more minutes. I thrill that I can sit here and recall so many good and wonderful events, people, places, things and feel just as good NOW as I did when I attracted and encountered these for the first time. Isn't it great to know that I can conjure up that feeling even now in the endgame of my life? That more than anything else tells me just how good it all has been, how wonderful it is.

Lord, I sound like George Bailey as I write here! But you know what? I don't care. It matters not because it DID matter that my life has been good and that I made it far more conscious than not especially as I continued to walk forward.

Last minute. There are no goodbyes as nothing ever dies. In just a moment, I'll know that to the core of what/who I am. That seems like a good place to bid this story adieu...