I realized as I looked over previous blog entries that mine are pretty "quote heavy", so this entry will be without quotes from others. The photo attached is our traditional goofy photo after Haley's graduation. I would not trade our silliness for anything! We took serious pictures, but the fun one is my favorite.

I wonder, as I re-read some of the quotations I have collected for this blog, if the authors actually lived their recommendations or if they wrote about their ideal life? I know Thoreau lived his treatise on solitude at Walden. What about George Carlin? His thoughts are so on target. I hope he truly lived them before his too short life ended this year.

Living life to the fullest is a recurrent theme that I have bumped into over the last few months. Perhaps this has to do with a universal longing to value the moments we have been blessed with on this earth and a reminder to slow down and fully absorb life's richness. I have watched two movies in the past two weeks that addressed this very issue - The Bucket List with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, in which two men with very different lives are hospitalized with cancers that are not curable and The Last Holiday with Queen Latifah as a woman who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease. Both movies address the quest to live life to the fullest and, in the end, discover what is most important.

Did Jack Kerouac actually take time to lie on the grass and look at the clouds? Does Joan Borysenko find her joy from within? What about Anne Morrow Lindberg? Was she able to find her "core" as she dealt with the tragedy in her life so that she could reconnect with others? The lesson to be learned from all of these quotations and the movies is to not wait for the "perfect" time or circumstance to fully engage in living. The "how to do it" is the challenge as I see it.

I'm attempting to identify the "what now" in my life. How do I reconstruct a life of meaning and purpose from a completely foreign frame of reference? All of the things that I thought defined who I am have changed or vanished. I should know by now that living is a continuous journey comprised of unlimited opportunities to redefine, refine, and refocus on the important things in life, which, by the way, are not "things"!

Socrates said that "the unexamined life is not worth living". This philosophy is challenged in Fieryo's song from the musical Wicked in the song "Dancing Through Life". Fieryo sings that schools teach the wrong lesson, that studying the strife in life only invites more stress in. He advocates living the "unexamined life". Fieryo has a point!!! We can easily get bogged down in thought rather than action.

Lesson - jump in!!! As long as you are breathing, there is more right with the world than wrong, so enjoy it and share it!!

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I can't resist the quotations!!! Sorry about that! These are short, sweet, and full of wisdom!

"Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way."
-Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
-Lao-Tzu