Be 100% in.

I am participating in #Trust30, an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.

Prompt #6: Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you had one week left to live, would you still be doing what you’re doing now? In what areas of your life are you preparing to live? Take them off your To Do list and add them to a To Stop list. Resolve to only do what makes you come alive.

Bonus: How can your goals improve the present and not keep you in a perpetual “always something better” spiral?

(Prompt by Jonathan Mead)

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One of my favorite quotes came from a copy of Reader's Digest magazine I found in my mom's bathroom years ago. I did the unthinkable–I tore it out of the pristine small pages of the Reader's Digest, and stuck it in my passport. It has traveled the world with me:

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life.  But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid.   Then life would begin.  At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” -Alfred D Souza

Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. This, THIS, this is the life. There is no waiting. None. No time for that.

Maybe goals are misleading. Maybe they induce too much striving, too much waiting, too much "not now, but then."

Maybe this forced march toward self-improvement keeps us out of the moment, the present, the now. It does. It does indeed. Ironic, isn't it.

What keeps me from being fully present in my life? And you?

Be 100% in.

(stones by Rock Fairy artist Kim Mailhot)