15 Minutes to Live

Day 1: #Trust30 Project

“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.

Whether you called me your daughter, your sister, your friend, your ex, your teacher, your healer or your enemy, each and every one of you helped me do exactly what I was supposed to do. I have lived a fuller life because you were in it. I came here to understand myself and, in the process, help you do the same. I didn’t always get it right, but I learned so much more from the things that went wrong then I did from the times things went my way–and things went my way in so many unexpected ways. It may have seemed like luck, but really it was just the way it needed to be for me to learn what I needed to learn, to love who I needed to love, to hurt when I needed to hurt, to help who I needed to help. Throughout my life, I’ve had many teachers, masters, shamans, poets, actors, authors, comedians, musicians and fools reveal their secrets to me. And every secret is the same. We are all afraid. Afraid we are not enough or we are too much, we are too poor or we are too rich (yes, it’s true!), we are too stressed or we are too carefree, we are too left or we are too right. But the truth is, we are all of this and we are none of this. We are not our fear. There’s no reason to fear even death because the only thing that exists on the other side is love unbound from the body we’ve inhabited for such a short time.

The struggle of life is to manage that fear. In every moment, there is a choice. The essence of the choice is this: fear or love, love or fear. We can call it an infinite number of other names, like should I move to New York or California? Oatmeal or toast? Walk or run? Married or single? Sometimes it may feel like there is no choice, but feel is the operative word here. There is a choice, it just might not be the one you thought you wanted it to be. But maybe that’s the choice that will open your heart wider than you ever thought possible, push you past what’s safe and comfortable to the point at which you think you will break and through it all you will know that fear could not stop you. Only you could do that. And when you’ve had enough of stopping, then simply start again.