Live a Real Life

      I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the war of being a good parent.

      I no longer considered myself as the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say today.

     So here is what I want to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a desire of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck. The larger house.

     Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter. And I realize that life is the best thing and that you have no business taking it for granted.

      It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to exist instead of to live. I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my choice, it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all.

I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and totally. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned.

By telling them this: Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a deadly illness, because if you do, you will live with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.