We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

You’ve lived through a powerful experience and made it out the other side. You want to tell your story, no, you need to tell your story so you can feel lighter but it’s hard to sit down and write.

At the core of most people’s list of reasons to avoid the blank page is fear of mediocrity. In the 1800s, classical composer Antonio Salieri was so jealous of his crony, Mozart’s genius, and so critical of his own work, he pronounced himself “the patron saint of mediocrity.” He couldn’t think of anything worse to be and he unsuccessfully chased greatness all of his life.

Author Tom Robbins describes his relationship to mediocrity in his novel, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas:

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. It’s a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.

I’ve been a fan of Tom Robbins ever since I read his early book, Another Roadside Attraction. I love his turns of phrase like the one above and his outrageous plots and simpatico characters. But I don’t agree with his sentiment about mediocrity because when you demonize anything, it gains power and becomes fair game for avoidance. My thoughts about this may be unpopular among writers since mediocrity is so reviled, but you have to start somewhere.

However long you’ve been writing, your initial attempt will not be all that good. It will be far from perfect. You can count on that. It might even be awful. But you can’t get what’s in your head onto the page without a few false starts. Surrealist painter Salvador Dali said, “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”

You just have to start. Any masterpiece begins with a single paint stroke, a musical note, a dance step or a word. When you’re writing Chapter One, it’s like

standing at the edge of a high diving board, toes over the end, drumming up the courage to make the leap. What if you jump and bang your head on the diving board or end up in an embarrassing and painful belly flop? The risk feels great but a few aches, pains, and belly flops are inevitable. If you can swallow your ego and allow yourself to suck at what you’re doing and then keep on doing it, you can only get better. You can eventually rise above mediocrity.

I used to work out at an elite gymnastics studio where girls from ages 5 to 18 showed up every day to practice. When a little girl began to train, she started on a balance beam that was less than a foot off the ground. She tried to walk as she took the necessary steps to learn the technique so she could eventually perform back flips on a beam that stood the requisite four feet from the ground. As she moved across the four-inch-wide surface, one bare foot in front of the other, jumping and twisting, you can bet she was going to fall. I watched what they went through, how their hands slipped off the uneven bars, they hit their heads, they fractured bones, they got shamed by their coaches, they cried in frustration, sprained their ankles and strained their muscles. But little by little, step by step, they got good enough to perform the death-defying feats that placed them in the category of Superhero.

Just like any athletic endeavor, good writing doesn’t happen suddenly or all at once. It’s a day-to-day practice and when you begin, your work usually comes out too jumbled, too sparse, too personal or not personal enough. It’s up to you to keep on going and make it better because writing is a process, not a onetime event.

The gift of mediocrity is finding a jumping off point for your story. Then you can improve the wording and do your best to be authentic. This will take time, something we dislike in this age of attention deficiency. Our society has long been one of instant gratification. We get little encouragement to build something slowly, from the bottom up, but that’s what it takes to finally be excellent. Or at least very good.

Some years ago, when I read through the initial draft of my first book about the Philippine healers, I was so disgusted with it, I threw the manuscript in a closet and slammed the door. I was done . . . until I opened it a few days later, retrieved the pages and got back to work. After several years, many rewrites and multiple rejections, I got a publishing deal. What if I hadn’t opened that closet door again? What if I had crumbled under the shame of mediocrity and stopped improving my work and looking for a publisher?

Imagine how many great books, paintings, operas, plays and films languish in the back of a closet or on a bottom shelf somewhere, never seeing the light of day because someone was afraid of being mediocre. When you find yourself in a rut, loath to stop writing and afraid to continue, if your work feels like junk and you have no idea what do, try forgiving yourself. That may sound weird but underneath the anger is a scared child who thinks she’s a loser. And you’ve beaten her to a pulp. The more you harangue and criticize her, the more she turns in on herself since anger begets fear which turns into paralysis.

When I feel lonely, uncomfortable and untalented, I try to forget about excellence. I see my work as my holy calling, a tile in the mosaic of my spiritual path. All that matters is getting the words on the page and finding the stamina and fortitude to keep on doing it. When you stop expecting perfection and accept mediocrity as a necessary part of the process, you’ll be amazed at the beauty, creativity, and inspiration that emerges from deep inside of you.

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re a waiter. Not a writer.

- - - Dan Poynter

Feeling inspired is a high like no other. It’s a divine spark. Your paintbrush skims across the canvas seemingly by itself. You hear the music inside your head before you open your mouth to sing. You feel the dance steps enlivening your muscles before you start to move. Your fingers fly across the keyboard like they have a mind of their own.

Feeling uninspired, a far more common occurrence, seems like a gray cloud is hovering. Your mind is jumbled and unfocused, skipping from thought to thought like an Orangutan, jumping from one tree branch to the next, never resting or alighting anywhere. Writing anything decent feels so remote, you decide your scribbles read like a first grader reporting to the class what you did last summer. You can’t win. Sticking with your work feels foolish and walking away feels cowardly.

The solution to this dilemma is straightforward. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Thomas Edison said that genius is five percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. If you keep at it long enough, you’ll eventually break through the perspiration and find the inspiration underneath it, right where it always was.

Does the following sound familiar?

It’s 3 AM and the muse whispers in your ear and wakes you up, flitting and tripping around your brain, hinting at the fabulous stories she’ll tell you when you start writing. She may even give you the first sentence. You sit up, jot down a few words and go back to sleep. The next morning, you boot up your computer. You look at the notes you made last night and your heart races with anticipation and possibility. You feel inspired as you place your fingers on the keyboard. You wait for a pulse of energy to run through you, and then . . . nothing. Your hands are still and you have no idea where that inspiration went.

When you’ve been writing for what feels like forever, searching everywhere for the muse, there’s no way to know if or when she’ll pay you a visit. Like a snobby socialite, she arrives fashionably late to the festivities if she comes at all and she doesn’t say good-bye when she leaves. But when you find a way to romance her without smothering or being demanding, when you let go and resign yourself to writing with her or without her, don’t be surprised if she sidles up like a cat, rubs against your legs, and pounces into your lap, bestowing upon you breathtaking pathways to your soul’s expression. I always seem to write better with a snoozing cat in my lap.

I keep in mind that for me, writing is a practice. I do it every day.

Inspiration on the other hand, is a gift. It comes and goes as it pleases.

The question is: Can you write when you don’t feel inspired? Do you have the patience to wait for the muse? For the inspiration? Do you have the wherewithal to write if she never shows up at all? Do you have the fortitude to face the blocks and find a way to move through them. I tell my students that I can’t teach them how to write. What I can teach them is how to remove the obstructions like self-criticism and making comparisons, the things that stop the inspiration from coming through.

When master painter Pablo Picasso was boarding an airplane in Spain, he dreaded flying and he was in a really bad mood when he took his seat, grousing at everyone and pouting like a child. But once he was in the air, he gazed out the window and he was astonished to see the clouds and the earth below appearing in cubic formations. This was his inspiration for his “Cubism” period. Even Picasso was unable to predict when the muse would come but when she did, he recognized her.

If you don’t feel inspired to do your work, you can turn to someone else to help but be careful of how you interpret it. A writer friend of mine was inconsolable after he read the highly lauded William Styron novel, Sophie’s Choice. The story line was so wrenching, the characters, the dialogue and the politics so authentic, he was too intimidated to pick up his own pen. He felt like it was a waste of time to even try. When I encouraged him to use that book for inspiration and give it a go, he said, “Why bother? Styron just did it perfectly. What’s left to say? The last thing the world needs is one more bad book cluttering the marketplace.”

My friend denied himself the opportunity to utilize something wonderful, a book he admired, to inspire and catapult him into the next phase of his own greatness. All he could do was compare himself to someone else, feel small and decide that he came up short.

When you witness a powerful performance, a masterful sculpture, a symphony or a good book, you have choices:

• You can ignore the great work altogether. It has nothing to do with you and it’s way beyond your reach.

• You can listen to your inner critic belittling and discouraging you until you vow never to try again. Nothing banishes inspiration faster than self-judgment.

Or:

• You can revel in the magnificence of someone else’s art, the power of the music, the flow of the words and use it all for inspiration. If they did it, why can’t you?

Genius is not that you are smarter than everyone else. It is that you are ready to receive the inspiration.

- - - Albert Einstein

A close friend visited me a few days ago. She is gorgeous inside and out. She has a genuine interest in learning and growing and she is kind. She recently had her hair cut in a stylish bob. She was wearing a pair of jeans that fit her perfectly and a tee shirt that showed off her flawless skin and her cleavage. She walked gracefully and she sat on my couch. I was in awe of how breathtakingly beautiful she was.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes. “What’s going on?” I asked her.

She grabbed some Kleenex. “I look terrible,” she said. “I can’t stand to look at myself in the mirror. I’m getting old. I hate my new haircut. I have a scar on my arm.”

She was thirty years younger than I was and she felt old and flawed. That was sad but not surprising. She had Body Dysmorphia, a common condition, mostly among women, in which a person becomes so intensely preoccupied with flaws in their appearance, they can’t see themselves like they really are. When someone loses a hundred pounds, they still see themselves a hundred pounds heavier. It’s pretty much an epidemic among women these days as we try to fit the mold. But who created the mold?

Body Dysmorphia isn’t isolated to our physical bodies. In the year 1969, I starred in a film about the Vietnam War. I was 19 and I loved acting but I thought I didn’t measure up in a lot of ways. When we shot the first scene and the soundman played back the audio, I thought my voice sounded so terrible, I was sure they would fire me. They didn’t. When the soundman looked unbothered and nodded to the director to go forward to the next scene, I was stunned.

I’ve attended various showings of that movie over the years for marketing purposes. When I was younger, it made me cringe to watch it. I didn’t like how I looked or sounded and sometimes I had to get up and leave the screening room. That changed. I own a copy of the film and when I decided to view it recently, I saw that I had been the woman I had wished to be. The woman that I thought was unattainable. I just couldn’t see it. The lesson was clear. Whatever age we are, it would be a good thing to try and appreciate ourselves because in the next decade, we’ll look back and admire how we looked. There’s no going back so we might as well accept ourselves in the here and now.

This kind of obsessing and criticizing doesn’t only happen as we age. A long time ago, Michelle Peiffer who has always been considered one of the greatest beauties in the film world, said she thought she looked like a duck. “It’s the way the corners of my mouth curl at the very end and my nose tilts up,” she said. “I should have played Howard the Duck.”

“If she thinks that about herself,” I thought, “I wonder what she thinks about the rest of us.”

Beauty is subjective. In the 1600s, Peter Paul Rubens painted women who were lush, full-figured and voluptuous. Skinny women must have felt inferior. Skip ahead about four hundred years and Twiggy was the symbol of beauty. She was skinny, tall, flat chested and she weighed 92 pounds. Women who had normal size bodies and large breasts felt inferior. They starved themselves and tried to measure up. Today, we still struggle with trying to look like someone else. Or trying to look like a better version of ourselves. What if we decided we’re perfect the way we are? We’d have a lot less stress and a lot more peace.

I think that beauty shows up when you decide to be yourself. I tell my students that there is no good or bad when they write. When they’re being authentic, that’s good writing. Beauty is the same. When you’re being genuinely yourself, you look wonderful. I’ve seen women who have crooked noses, small eyes and flawed skin and they look amazingly beautiful because of the light that seems to shine from their insides out. I was once at a small dinner party with friends. A man I didn’t know came over to me to introduce himself. He was friendly and gracious and I found him quite attractive. He said to me, “You have a lovely face but the most beautiful part of you is the way you light up a room.”

All I could hear was that I wasn’t beautiful. That I was lovely “but.” It seemed like it was “less than” and I felt insecure. It wasn’t until years later that I understood he had given me a supreme compliment. Lighting up a room was so much better than looking a certain way. Your looks will change but you can light up a room for the rest of your life.

For me, being beautiful doesn’t mean having pretty hair or large eyes. It’s about being compassionate and caring of the people around you. It’s about being appreciative, sensitive and gentle with the people you love and with yourself. The most beautiful woman I ever saw was a Native American Elder whose face was so lined and wrinkled, it looked like a roadmap to her life.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, pioneer in death, dying and grief, said, “Beautiful people do not just happen. The most beautiful people I have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.”

I found an amusing article written by a reporter for Reuter’s Daily News some years ago. A few minutes before noon, a trio of Buddhist monks in their orange and red robes were headed to the Golden Arches. Not the gateway to heaven like you might think. They were on a break from the work they had been doing and they causally strolled through the swinging doors of a MacDonald’s fast-food restaurant. No bowing or blessing. No sacred chants or meditations or incantations. They simply ordered food, paid for it and sat down in a booth, laughing and munching their quarter-pounder extra-value meals. When they were finished eating, they walked down the street and got back to work.

They were performing an ancient Tibetan ritual called “sand painting,” a striking illustration of the impermanent nature of life. For weeks and sometimes months, a number of monks sit cross legged on the floor in a meditative state, they pour colored grains of sand into one end of a copper funnel-like instrument and they tap the sand out the other end, forming intricate, colorful designs they call a mandala. (sacred essence) Throughout the process, they silently thank the local spirits and focus on world peace and freedom from suffering. When they finish their magnificent word of art, they take in the beauty and then they do the unthinkable. They deliberately destroy the painting, swirling their fingers through it and later placing the sand into flowing water.

The point of this sacred work is not about suggesting that beauty is pointless. Rather this practice teaches us that we can appreciate beauty fully without expecting it to last. The message is: Appreciate what is here. And when the time comes, let it go.

The idea that everything changes and nothing lasts forever is at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. In the East, children are taught to accept the transient nature of the physical body as soon as they are old enough to understand. I was in the streets of Bali when a long funeral procession came by. The children were dashing in and out and ducking under the body that was being transported, laughing and chasing each other. The adults were watching the children play and smiling at their antics.

Here in the West, when a child asks about the meaning of death, the common answer is, “You’re too young to be thinking about such things.” Or “It won’t happen for a long time.” I had a great aunt Ruth who was as close to me as a mother. I was six when she died and I pleaded with my parents to take me to her funeral. They said it was no place for a child. I watched their car drive down the street and I felt devastated. Not only because Ruth had died but also because I was being left out. My parents wanted to save me from what they thought would cause me suffering, but I wanted to honor her and shed tears for her and feel the sadness of the other people who loved her.

There are a lot of theories and beliefs about what happens when we leave this earth, but whatever we believe or envision or hope, it falls under the category of something we can’t understand and we never will. All we know is that it’s inevitable. No matter how much we work out, eat cleanly and exercise our brains, we can’t escape the inescapable. No matter how much we doctor our faces and bodies so we look younger, we can’t change the final outcome. On his death bed, someone asked Greek philosopher, Socrates, how to find wisdom. He said, “Practice dying.”

A spiritual teacher of mine said, “Dying is perfectly safe. It isn’t tragic. It’s inevitable.” Impermanence is nothing unusual. It happens to everyone and everything. Every tree, blade of grass, insect and human being is changing and growing older, moment to moment. We don’t have to like it but we can find a way to accept it. Mark Twain said, “I’m all for progress. It’s change that I object to.”

Living life to the fullest and having gratitude is relevant because we have an expiration date. If we didn’t, we might put things off indefinitely. An expiration date encourages us to do things now. To appreciate. To see the good instead of complaining. To forgive sooner rather than later. To offer help. To treat each other with respect and appreciation. Most importantly, it encourages us to be mindful and work at being completely present in each moment.

In 1996, I was fortunate to meet Timothy Leary a few months before he died. He was a Harvard educated psychologist and strong advocate of psychedelic drugs. When I went inside his house, he was shirtless, wearing a tie and speeding from room to room in a wheelchair. He told me that he had ordered a sensory deprivation tank so he could practice dying. He was facing the greatest change of his life and he was celebrating it.

I aspire to have the same attitude. I can’t say that I’ve embraced impermanence with any regularity but the more I breathe and meditate and write and discuss death with other people, the more I see it, not an enemy but rather a path to another reality. When I think of Timothy Leary, I admire his courage and I hope I’ll be in a place to face death head on when it arrives and disrupts my busy schedule.

The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.
- - - Frank Lloyd Wright

Over the last nine months, I wrote a memoir for Betsy, a wonderful 74-year-old woman who goes on month long charity horse treks in Mongolia. When she called to ask me to write her memoir, I told her that I didn’t write other people’s books any more, but by the time we finished our conversation, I had agreed to work with her. I was attracted to the fact that she was doing treks to raise money for poverty-stricken children. She was kind and delightful. She offered to pay me well. These were all plusses but there was a reason that eclipsed them. She was encouraging other women to “find their brave” at any age. To never give up trying to make their dreams come true.

These are the doctrines that Betsy lives by:

I can do so much more than I think I can.

Age doesn’t matter. I’m just getting started.

She was preparing to ride 100 miles in one day in the Mongolian wilderness when she read about a woman named Diana Nyad. She was a 64-year-old swimmer who had been attempting a 110-mile open water swim from Havana, Cuba, to Key West Florida since she was 28. She had tried many times over the years and failed. Finally, when she was 64, she completed the swim that took her 53 non-stop hours. Some of her doctrines were similar to Betsy’s:

Never give up.

You’re never too old to chase your dreams.

Betsy and I spent a lot of time laughing. Aging well requires commitment, inner strength and the ability to laugh at yourself. It requires the ability to release the things that don’t serve you and embrace the things that do.

Ancient poet/Sufi Mystic said, “Wisdom comes from surrender, not from accumulating achievements.”

I was in my sixties when someone introduced me to a brilliant trainer, Orlando, who told me about one of his martial arts teachers who was eighty and he kept getting stronger. All I’d ever heard was when you reached your sixties and seventies, you were pretty much over the hill and you would keep getting weaker. I rejected that. I wanted to feel strong and vital. I’m not suggesting that you pay no attention to your age and risk getting hurt. I’m talking about never underestimating what you’re capable of. Granted, there are illnesses we contract that we can’t avoid, there are injuries that we have to nurse, but if you’re fortunate enough to be able to get up in the morning, it’s something to celebrate, however young or old you are.

These days, I have a remarkable online trainer, Kerry, who works with clients of all ages. She’s a champ at evaluating what her clients can do safely and what they need to be careful of. She reminds me to listen to the messages my body is sending me. She helps me strengthen my core and that keeps my body in alignment. She keeps me laughing. I get intermittent aches and pains these days, but when I pay attention, I enjoy my life, I rarely get hurt and I heal pretty fast.

It’s ironic that we want to live a long life but we don’t want to get old. Getting older has some definite drawbacks but it also has some great rewards. Wisdom. Compassion. Knowledge gained by experience. Increased awareness of what you’re feeling at any given time and how to be kind to yourself.

Today, I feel proud of who I am. I don’t get offended when someone says, “You look good for your age.” I like hearing that. I have no control over being young or being old so why should I feel shame about getting older? I’ve learned that if I keep my body moving, check my negative, fear-ridden thoughts about aging and stay in the moment, I get stronger and healthier, in body and in mind.

I live in a society where erasing your face of all wrinkles and age lines is common practice. People are trying to stop time. But no matter what we do on the outside, the inside keeps on moving forward and getting older. I once saw a photograph of a Native American elder who had so many lines on her face, it looked like a roadmap of her life. I was overwhelmed by her beauty. I wished I could know her and sit with her and maybe some of that wisdom might rub off.

The Dalai Lama says that while physical decline cannot be stopped, a well-trained, peaceful mind remains strong, allowing us to use our long experience to find deep inner calm.

Isn’t that what we all want?

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

- - - Oscar Wilde

One of the most destructive things we can do is compare ourselves to other people. I do it. Not purposely. It’s a bad habit. When I catch myself, I try not beat myself up about it. Instead, I focus and try to let it go. Sometimes I’m successful, but when I’m not, I’m headed straight for the downward spiral. If I think I’m better than someone else, my self-congratulatory attitude is certain to end in a swift and painful fall off the pedestal. If I think I’m worse than someone else, a far more often occurrence, I feel defeated and try to claw my way back up.

I marvel at the courage of some artists demonstrate to be innovative and unusual. In 1913, when Igor Stravinsky composed the music for the ballet, “The Rite of Spring,” he journeyed into a faraway realm of the unconscious, a place he had never been before, where his music was driven solely by his gut feelings. No one was ready for it. During the first performance of his new work, the audience disliked the dissonance of the music, the jerky movements of the dancers and the rapidly twittering sounds from the woodwind section. It irritated them. It didn’t sound like anything they’d ever heard before and a number of them walked out of the theater, disgusted. Stravinsky stood by his rare artistic expression that didn’t compare to anyone else’s and since then, “The Rite of Spring” has become one of the most often recorded works in the worldwide classical repertoire.

Each of us are connected as part of the human race, but we’re also different. I became aware of how different we all are when I was in elementary school. There was a big snow storm, we could see it out of our school room windows, and the teacher gave us each a sheet of white paper and scissors and asked us to cut out a design for a snowflake. We folded and snipped our creations and when we were finished and unfolded them, she tacked them all onto a bulletin board. I looked at them with wonder. We had all started out with the identical white piece of paper and identical scissors, but each of us had come up with something different.

Human beings are like snowflakes. Each of us is an individual expression with powerful emotions and a brand of creativity that is all our own. We have unique chemical makeup, physical health, mental capabilities, interests and beliefs. In the words of modern dance pioneer, Martha Graham:

Your expression is unique and it is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

We all want to be loved and we want to love other people but the ways we find what we’re looking for are vastly different.

You sit in meditation. I sit in front of a computer and write.

You paint and I dance.

You play the guitar and I listen to classical music.

You speak Spanish and I speak English.

You cook and I eat.

You like to garden and I like to knit beautiful sweaters.

You have a husband and children. I live alone.

You like dogs. I like cats.

You have a great sense of direction. I can get lost on my own street.

None of the above are better or worse. They just are. I once attended what was called a “chakra collage” workshop. A dear friend was the leader and around the perimeter of the room were boxes filled with magazine cutouts that matched the colors of the seven chakras. Once we chose a chakra, we rummaged through the corresponding cutouts and picked the ones we liked. The ones spoke to us. We snipped at them, rearranged them, glued them together and although we had all chosen from the same boxes, our end results couldn’t have been more different. Each was beautiful in its own way and we had fun admiring and sharing them with each other. If we had compared our pieces and thought that we had come up short, that would have been untrue and it would have opened us up to a world of pain.

Spiritual leader, Iyanla Vanzant, said, “Comparison is an act of violence against the self.” When we compare, we fold in on ourselves. Our hearts and our bodies become tight and we feel jealous. We question what we’re doing and we pay no attention to our intuition. Conversely, when we see everything for the individual wonder that it is, we open up. Our hearts and our bodies expand and we feel compassion. We drop into what we’re doing and we relax into the beauty that is all around us.

When we compare, we reject what is actually happening in the moment. If we can stop trying to be like someone else and learn to accept ourselves, exactly like we are and exactly where we are, all that remains is beauty.

Theodore Roosevelt said, Comparison is the thief of joy.”

There are only two ways to live your life.

As though nothing is a miracle,

Or as though everything is a miracle.

- - - Albert Einstein

In 1957, when I was eight, my father showed me a rectangular card with blue and silver graphics of two astronauts in spacesuits and helmets, holding oxygen tanks and walking on a white surface in boxy-looking boots. The card had a serial number and a hand-written signature in blue ink.

“Look at this,” he whispered.

“Why are we whispering?”

“Because it’s a secret. If you promise not to tell, I’ll let you in on it.”

“I promise.”

“It’s a ticket from Pan Am for the first space shuttle to the moon,” he said.

“You’re going to the moon?” I whispered. “Can I come too?” I raised my voice. “You can’t go without me!”

“Sh-h-h. I have four tickets—one for each of us. We’re all going. But don’t tell your mother. She’ll think I’m nuts.”

I agreed that she would be a hard sell.

The now defunct Pan American Airlines had placed an ad in the newspaper, offering seats to civilians on their first commercial flight to the moon, first come, first serve.

My father sent them this note:

Attention: Reservations

Gentlemen: I wish to reserve four (4) seats, first-class, for your first trip to the moon. Please advise when we can plan to make this trip, and how much luggage we would be permitted to carry.

Thank you for confirmation.

Very truly yours, Samuel M. Cagan

Shortly afterward, he received an official letter with the tickets enclosed, declaring us members of the First Moon Flights Club. The confirmation letter read:

Dear Moon First Flighter,

Thank you for your confidence that Pan Am will pioneer commercial space travel, as it so often has here on Earth. The enclosed cards formally recognize your intrepid spirit. It reflects by serial number your family’s position of record on our Waitlist For Moon First Flights.

Starting date of service is not yet known. Equipment and route will be subjected to government approvals. Fares may be out of this world. We ask you to be patient while these things are worked out before we accept deposits or make confirmed reservations.

We will keep you informed of all developments and we thank you for coming to Pan Am first. That’s exactly what we intend to be. On earth. To the moon. Any place else.

Sincerely, James Montgomery

Vice-President, Sales

My father was pure magic. He would toss me in the air and when he put me back down, I ran beside him and together we kissed the wind. A strikingly handsome man, he was always ready to break out into a smile. He had a full head of smoky brown hair and an infectious sense of humor. He was irreverent without being rude and he was full of surprises. In preparation for our upcoming moon shot, he took me to the Planetarium where we leaned back in our chairs and looked at thousands of stars and constellations projected onto a domed ceiling.

One morning, he woke me up before sunrise and we drove to a vacant lot near the airport to watch an eclipse of the sun. He was fascinated by both science and mystery and he taught me to look for unexpected things that were hiding in plain sight.

No matter how scary or hard life was, my father reminded me to find the magic. He said it was always there. We just had to remember to look for it. When we had crashing thunderstorms, he took the family onto our screened porch at the back of our house and with each flash of lightning and peal of thunder, he told us stories and made us laugh. He taught me not to be afraid and I still associate thunderstorms with excitement and play.

It’s make-believe magic when movie superheroes do impossible feats like flying through the air, scaling the sides of skyscrapers or disappearing into thin air, but there is real magic in the little things. Music that carries you into a new dimension. Hummingbirds whose wings can flap 200 times per second. Ballerinas who dance on the tips of their toes. A baby taking her first steps. The way our bodies heal.

Real magic is a lot more than Abra Cadabra. It’s a feeling, a sense of mystery, a way to marvel at the inexplicable synchronicities of life. There is a great deal more than the eye can see and you can rise above the darkness and journey toward the light of the miraculous. All you have to do is believe.

J. M. Barrie, the author of “Peter Pan,” said, “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.”

I was recently watching an inspiring documentary on Amazon Prime called “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.” I’ve always been a fan of his music. It helps me open my heart. I rested my eyes from time to time during that documentary and listened to the familiar songs that were part of the backdrop of my twenties. The Boxer. Bridge Over Troubled Water. The Sound of Silence.

I was inspired by the music but I was equally inspired by what Mr. Simon said about his process. How he got the sounds in his head to grace his voice and his musical instruments. His guitar. Drums. Bells. What spoke to me the most was the patience it took for him keep going, to wait for the music to come, to feel it in his bones and to find the joy at the end of the long tunnel of patience. “Slow down, you move too fast,” his lyrics say. “You gotta make a moment last.”

His music was beautiful when he was with Art Garfunkel.” The harmonies were exquisite but in the documentary, Paul didn’t look happy when they were singing together. In fact, he looked sad. He said that he and his partner found each other irritating on so many levels and that took away the joy. But he beamed with happiness when he played with the South African musicians. He had stopped recording and songwriting for a couple of years before and when he returned, his joy was the reward at the end of a long and patient tunnel. When he danced around the stage, singing and playing music, I got the impression that he had finally found the joy he had searched for his whole life. He had had the patience to wait for his dreams to come true and he was reaping the benefits.

When you think about it, it seems like joy has nothing to do with patience, but they actually have a great deal to do with each other. Patience plays an important part in my writing. When I’m writing a book, I usually have a lot of false starts at the beginning of my chapters. Sometimes I write something that I consider acceptable and I move forward but when I read it back, it sounds like a hiccup. A burp. After I read it through a few more times, it doesn’t seem acceptable any more. I have to go back, delete what I wrote and take the time to find something better. When I find it and read it back, I feel happy that I was patient enough to wait for the joy to show up.

When I write with no deadlines, I’m free to patiently wait for the reward I’m looking for. I can’t predict how long it will take. There is no time limit or way of predicting how long the search will go on. “It takes as long as it takes.” So goes the old saying. But however long it takes, when I find what I’m looking for, I feel proud of how it has turned out and I know that it was worth the wait.

In my world of crafts, knitting is another example of the rewards I receive from patience. I love to knit. I’ve been doing it since I was eight years old and I make beautiful sweaters and scarves. It takes time to imagine and create them and I fall into a rhythm. I love the sound of the needles clicking together, the feel of the yarn, and the anticipation of finishing something, but there’s an all too common obstacle that slows down the process and requires patience to correct it: dropping a stitch. It happens to new knitters and veterans alike. If you drop a stitch one or two rows down, you can pick it up pretty easily, but when it drops many rows below, the only thing you can do is rip the sweater twenty rows down, pick all the stitches back up and do it all over again. This takes patience and the vow to not give up. I used to go to a knitting store in Sherman Oaks and there was a placard on the wall that said: As ye knit, so shall ye rip.

Patience is not only about waiting. It’s how you act while you wait. I’ve been involved in a lot of disagreements throughout my lifetime that have tested my patience. Sometimes I’ve managed to slow it all down and stop and breathe. At other times, I’ve failed spectacularly. But either way, I’ve come to understand that being patient doesn’t necessarily mean accepting something that you find to be unacceptable. It doesn’t have anything to do with suppression. I’ve found that patience is a choice. It has to do with acknowledging what you’re feeling and choosing not to act aggressively. It has a lot to do with being totally honest with yourself that you’re furious and finding the strength of be smart and wait anyway. It has to do with taking your time to be present with a situation and wait until something changes. It will, because one thing we know for sure is that everything changes.

We are all human beings, doing the best we can. Sometimes waiting is easy and sometimes it feels completely impossible. And still, we can choose how to be with it. Buddhism doesn’t see patience as a passive kind of endurance. They see it as an active, courageous inner strength that allows you to accept reality exactly as it is even if you don’t like it and maintain a peaceful mind in the face of difficulties. It is the practice of staying present with discomfort without reacting aggressively. However long it takes to accept the truth about a situation or yourself, being able to feel the joy is the pot of gold.

Bruce Lee said, “Patience is not passive. On the contrary, it is concentrated strength.”

Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away.”

- - - Tom Brokaw

I remember a movie from 1992 called “Hero” where Dustin Hoffman played a bitter petty thief who begrudgingly rescued people from a devastating plane crash. He just happened to come upon the crash site and he was annoyed that people needed him. He rescued as many people as he could, muttering to himself the whole time, and then he disappeared.

Everyone loves a hero. Especially a humble one. But these days, it isn’t enough to be a hero. We aspire to be a Superhero whose powers go beyond human capabilities. We want to fly, become invisible and scale up the sides of buildings on sticky feet like Batman, Spiderman, Superman, Antman and Captain Marvel.

What about being a heroic human being, someone who cares for someone else who is sick and dying? What about people who risk their lives to put out fires. Someone who fights to save our country. Someone who defies their inner critic and finishes a work of art: a book, a painting. Someone who stands up to a bully and soothes someone who is in grief or fear. Someone who practices every day to achieve excellence like sports champions, figure skaters, ballet dancers and gymnasts who fly, twist, and put up with pain without complaint.

Before Covid, I used to work out in a gym for elite female athletes. I wasn’t doing gymnastics. My talented trainer, Orlando, just happened to rent out space and conduct his sessions there and I did what I call a regular person’s workout. I have to say that I was slightly intimidated by the little girls when I first showed up but I loved watching them. While I was doing crunches, stretching and lifting light weights, they were walking on their hands, spinning on the uneven bars, tumbling, pushing off the vault, flipping in the air, conquering the balance beam, trying to dismount without injuring themselves and practicing a host of strengthening and agility exercises. During my sessions, any time I felt tired or bored, all I had to do was look up and see someone flying through the air.

It was miraculous that they could perform the challenging things they did on a daily basis. I watched them soar and I watched them fall hard. I watched them train with a cast on one leg. I watched them fall off the beam, bruise their thighs, cry out in pain and frustration and get back on the beam. To me, they were heroes, believing in themselves, working daily to achieve what most of can’t imagine achieving.

It reminded me of my ballet training. I pretty much grew up in a dance studio, practicing all day long, spinning, balancing and jumping on the tips of my toes. I performed on a sprained ankle. I performed when I had the flu. I performed when I was exhausted from many weeks of one-night stands, touring across the United States in a bus, crying because I was lonely and hungry. I starved and bled, leapt and pirouetted, stained and sprained, all with a beatific smile on my face. And in the end, I felt proud of myself. I had done what I had set out to do and when I went to sleep at night, I felt gratified.

More challenging than physical feats, however, are emotional and physical ones. It’s easy to pretend to have super powers, but it’s hard to see your human self in glowing terms. It’s heroic to find compassion for yourself when you think you’ve done something wrong. It’s heroic to stay present when you’re feeling so much pain and sorrow, you can hardly stand it. Facing your fear requires you to look deep inside and find the courage and vulnerability to see that while you’re not a super hero, you still have extraordinary abilities. Maybe you’re compassionate with other people no matter how they treat you. Maybe you listen so well, it heals someone. Maybe you feed hungry people or you have the ability to make people laugh in the toughest of circumstance like my friend, Rhoni, who excels in both.

For me, it’s heroic to accept myself and other people just the way they are. To accept how I look. To sit in traffic without swearing. To stop telling anyone else what to do. To tell the truth when a lie would be so much easier. To do something that scares me and embarrasses me. Finding an address without getting lost. Telling the truth about how I feel when I want someone to like me. Telling the truth when it fills me with shame. Asking for something when I’m afraid of being rejected.

You can be a hero on a small level or a grand one, but however it looks and however you define it, it takes courage and determination to live up to what it implies. Smart, strong, selfless, hopeful, resilient, reliable, caring and inspiring. Falling and getting up. These words all pertain to the real heroes who walk among us. We can spot them because they give us hope, inspiration and the determination to face our fears without running away.

“Being a hero isn’t about grand, cinematic moments; it is about quiet sacrifice, relentless perseverance, and choosing to help others.”

- - - Anonymous

I have a famous bed. It’s a healing bed. It’s my peaceful place, a corner of the world that asks nothing of me but to let go and just breathe. It serves other people as well. When a close friend is having a meltdown, I put her in my bed and I stroke her head until they drop into a quiet place. They feel much better when they get up. It’s as if the bed wraps its covers around them and gives them comfort and safety in a difficult and challenging world.

Years back, I met with a legendary diva who was looking for a writer for her memoir. The meeting went well. I knew that she was interviewing other writers but I left feeling optimistic. Several days went by and I hadn’t heard anything. I was bummed. I assumed that she had hired someone else but on the fourth day, I got a call. It was her voice at the other end of the call and she told me that I had gotten the job. I felt excited and privileged but that feeling didn’t last long. “I get to write her memoir” shifted to, “I have to write her memoir,” an entire book from scratch about someone I didn’t know. My initial excitement turned into trepidation and doubt. How could I possibly write in this lauded woman’s voice?

I climbed into my bed. I wrapped the covers around me, I lay my head on a mountain of pillows and dropped into the serene place between waking and sleeping. My safety didn’t come from hiding in my bed. I wasn’t trying to run away from my feelings. It was a moment to get present with my thoughts with no interruptions. When I got up, I still felt scared but I also knew I was capable of facing my challenges with courage and compassion.

When it all gets overwhelming, it’s a great comfort to have a sacred place to close your eyes, slow down your breathing and let your body soften. It doesn’t have to be your bed. It can be a meditation nook, an easy chair, a soft cushion or an altar with a statue of Buddha and some beautiful crystals. Anywhere that you feel safe. If you don’t already have a place like that create it for yourself. It could be a corner of a room where no one will disturb you as you tune into your breath and get present with yourself.

Years back, I was renting a house with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large kitchen, a living room and a dining room. I loved being there, but one day, I got a call that the owner had decided to sell the house. I was distraught and I made a vow that no one would ever again be able to force me to move. I hired a real estate agent and on that first day, we looked at a few places to see what was out there. None of them spoke to me. The last place I saw was in the Hollywood Hills. I walked up the brick stairs, I stepped inside and I heard a long breathy exhale. It was coming from me. I felt an overwhelming sense of peacefulness. I felt safe. I knew I was home and I made an offer on the spot. It was accepted. To this day, decades later, each time I open my front door and step inside my house, I hear that same exhale. The house feels like “mother” and I know I can handle whatever challenges come my way.

Throughout my life, I’ve found places where I feel blessed. A mountain in the Philippines that my friends and I climbed at night to watch shooting stars. The ballet studio where I rehearsed every day in my torn leotard and tights. Teaching a class where my students write about the intimate things that need healing. And of course, my famous bed.

When I was a child, my family owned a summer boarding house in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. There were ten rooms, two cottages, a dining hall where the guests ate, our private kitchen and an annex with four more rooms. It had a white washed fence and a long front porch with a dozen side-by side rocking chairs. It was called the Tide Rock House and it had a soul as ancient as the icy sea water down the block. I loved going to the beach. I climbed the rocks and poked my small fingers into the sudsy tide pools. I upset small fish, miniature crabs with transparent legs, shell chips and seaweed strands, colorful pieces of broken plastic and the occasional condom that I mistook for jellyfish parts. It was a great adventure but oddly enough, I was happier when the day was overcast. That meant we would all gather in the large living room and sit and talk. Someone played the piano, we sang and it felt safe and intimate.

Safety means something different to each of us. For me, it means connection, steadiness, being grounded and believing in myself. It means having a quiet mind and ignoring my inner critic that’s trying to tell me I’m in trouble or I’m doing the wrong thing. It means breathing deeply and taking care of my inner child who deserves my compassion and understanding.

You can’t keep difficulties away, they are part of being human, but you can create a place that will help you cope with them. Your boat may capsize and you may feel like you’re at sea, flailing around, but when you find a place to let go and be there for yourself, you can become your own safe harbor and the world feels less threatening and more welcoming.

“Everyone deserves a place where they feel welcome.”

- - -Anonymous

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”

. . . Jimi Hendrix.

Back in the nineteen eighties, I volunteered at Chris Brownlie AIDS hospice where there were 26 beds and 26 dying men. This was before the life-saving cocktails when having HIV meant there wasn’t much time left. I went from room to room to sit with each resident and see what he needed and wanted during his last days. A hand to hold? Something particular to eat? An opportunity to vent?

There was a man in particular whom I was very fond of. There were notes in the volunteer lounge on each resident and I checked his records before I went to his room. He had bone cancer and AIDS. His condition was so dire, I didn’t know what I could possibly say to him.

When I arrived at his room, the door was open. He was awake and I lightly knocked. “Hello,” I said, “May I come in?”

“Yes. Please do,” he said.

I sat in the chair beside his bed and I didn’t say anything. I just listened. “Too many volunteers just barge right into my room without asking permission,” he said. “They walk in like I’m not a person and they talk their heads off and tell me what to do. I like to smoke a cigarette once in a while and yesterday, a volunteer scolded me about how dangerous it was and how I needed to stop. I sent him away. I don’t have very long in this world and I don’t intend to spend my last days in deprivation. There’s nothing anyone can say or do that will fix or change my situation. All I want is for someone to listen to me. To really hear me. To respect my space, both physically and emotionally.”

He asked me to hand him a cigarette and I did. I lit it for him and I saw peacefulness come over him. I had spent the requisite time being schooled in how to act when I was in the hospice but this was Volunteer Training 101. When I left this man’s room, I had said very little and I had gained a vast amount of wisdom that I could use in the hospice and in my life.

I carried on with my volunteer work and I continued to sit and listen. “Is there something I can do for you or get for you?” That was one of the few questions I asked. One man said that he needed to make sure someone was holding his hand when he died. The other volunteers and I took shifts and gave him what he wanted. Another man wanted to take a shower every day and a male volunteer helped him do that.

During my time there, I sat with a man in his thirties who wanted to talk about his career in the opera. He related to me since I had been in the ballet and I spent a long time hearing his experiences. He was fascinating. One day he told me that he loved peanuts. I bought a large bag of them and I was looking forward to giving them to him, but when I arrived at his room the next day, the bed was empty. He had died in the night. I went into the lounge and left the bag of peanuts there. I was terribly upset. but I was also happy that I had spent so much time listening to the things he had wanted to say. The things he had wanted someone to hear.

When we have a difficult or confusing choice to make, we often want to run it by someone but we don’t necessarily want them to tell us what to do. We don’t want them to problem solve for us. We want them to listen and become a sounding board that will shed light on our situation so we can decide what would be best for us. If someone barges in with an unsolicited opinion like the volunteer who scolded the resident for smoking, it will only cause us to become defensive and resentful.

It’s comforting when someone really listens to you. You feel satisfied, supported and understood. It’s off putting when someone is so busy figuring out the next thing they want to say, you feel unheard and ignored. It feels like they don’t care what you’re saying so why bother? I make it a habit to stay quiet and refrain from giving my opinion unless someone asks for it. Even then, I have no attachment to whether or not they do what I suggest. My hospice days taught me that allowing people their dignity, no matter what I think about their choices, is the greatest gift we can offer. When we just listen and withhold judgment, we have the opportunity to understand the other person and see that we are all connected.

Listening is not a skill we were born with. Like so many other things, the Buddhist philosophy calls it a profound spiritual practice rooted in compassion and mindfulness. When someone opens up about an issue they are contemplating, we may think we have a solution but it isn’t their solution. What we would do isn’t what they would do. We each have our own karma and our own lessons to learn. When we refrain from telling someone what we think they should do, that’s what being a friend means. It’s about honoring their process and encouraging them to listen to their own body and their own messages.

Winston Churchill said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.

- - Albert Einstein

Being creative and innovative requires self-acceptance and the belief that what you have to say has value. That it’s worth something. It takes time and belief in myself to write a blog every week. Each one requires time and creativity. They require new ideas. Sometimes I wonder what on earth I still have to say, but I always come up with something new that makes me want to write and see what ends up on the page.

I was at dinner with few friends when a woman a woman asked me, “Do you just go to the computer and write your blog in one session? Do you know what you’re going to write about before you sit down to do it? Is it hard to feel confident?”

I write my blogs over several days and I don’t always feel confident. I usually have a bunch of false starts before I choose a topic and get into the swing. I don’t look for shock value. I’m not interested in gossip or political negativity. In the words of the Tibetan Monks that I follow, I search for something that is wholesome. That word intrigues me. I see it as something healthy and positive that makes me feel open and secure whether I’m happy or sad, fulfilled or regretful. I have found that if I tell my story with honesty and compassion, my ideas will most likely resonate with other people and we will all feel satisfied and gratified.

When I decided to write my memoir, I thought about how I would approach it. I could write the positive highlights of my life and tell some noteworthy and playful stories. I had a lot of them. But if I didn’t expose the difficulties and disappointments along the way and the fears I had encountered, it would be boring. It would sound whitewashed. I made a commitment to dig deep, to reveal my fears and doubts and put them on the page. I searched for the courage to find worth in the things I had done and how my experiences made me the person I had become.

Today I see that writing from my heart sparks emotions in other people. I look for ways to be kind and compassionate with myself no matter what I’m writing and provide something real and authentic and worthwhile that people can hold onto. Even when the writing flows, doing this isn’t easy. Over the years, my students know how scary it is to open their hearts and reveal the truth without self-judgment. It’s a challenge to believe that they’re worth it. One of them gets sweaty hands before she reads. Another one is so sure that his pieces are terrible, he stammers when he begins. One student apologizes for making it too short and another one apologizes for making it too long. We just can’t give ourselves a break and trust that if our writing is valuable to us, it will be valuable to other people.

When my memoir came out, I was invited to a women’s book club. Someone asked me, “How could you tell the truth about that abusive relationship you had? Doesn’t it make you feel ashamed and naked?”

“Yes, it does,” I said, “but it also makes me feel connected to other women. We all have difficulties in our lives and I believe that it is the job of good writers to say the things that other people are afraid to say out loud. Whatever you say is worth saying because you are not alone in your fears and shame.”

Spiritual teacher, Baba Ram Dass said that when we let of our perceived unworthiness, we can recognize our own beauty.

I’ve learned over time that however it looks from the outside, we are all worthy human beings with worthy human feelings that help us find connection with our fellow travelers. I was able to successfully work with celebrities because I was aware that when a performer is lauded and celebrated for his or her talent, they still go home to their families and their insecurities. They still have to work on their marriages and raise their children to be good people. They still have to nurture their friendships and perhaps most important of all, they have to be able to withstand criticism and believe that they are worthy of the life they are living.

Motivational speaker, Brene Brown says: “You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”

“If you don’t believe in any kind of magic or mystery, you’re as good as dead.”

- - - Albert Einstein

When I think of magic, I think about music. It has no physical presence and yet, it moves me. It soothes. It communicates and it heals. It hovers in the atmosphere and it speaks to me without a voice. When I play music from the sixties, it transports me back in time to a familiar place that is familiar and nourishing. It’s an invisible force that turns sound into feeling, memory and meaning. Mozart’s music inspired the phrase, “the magic of Mozart.”

When I think of magic, I think about dreams. They have no beginning, middle or end. They have no substance. They have hidden meaning that’s open to interpretation and they run away from you when you try to chase them. They show us possibilities that we never imagined. Walt Disney’s vision revolved around the magic of wonder and imagination.

When I think of magic, I think about light. Hit a switch and it wipes out the darkness. It beckons you without a touch. It silently warms you and soothes you when you feel gloomy or negative. It arrives each morning without fail and it can turn an ordinary vista into something breathtaking. Master painter Rembrandt used light as if it were a living presence, not merely to illuminate a scene but also to tell a story, reveal a character and evoke emotions. He embodied the magic of light.

When I think of magic, I think about hope. When the world is swirling around you, out of control and enigmatic, hope is an invisible beacon that can guide you to friendlier shores. It can pull you out of a devastating rabbit hole and give you an shoulder to lean on even though it has no substance. It can help you take the first step to something that previously felt unattainable. Concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl, used the magic of hope and meaning to keep him alive amid the worst kind of suffering.

Magic exists in the everyday world around us. Early one morning when I was seven, it was still dark when my father took me to an open field beside our local airport.

“Why are we here?” I asked him. “Are we going on a plane?”

“No. Something is coming to us. It’s a solar eclipse. When the sun starts to rise, the moon’s going to cover it and make it dark again for a little while.”

“Why?”

“The moon is jealous. It has to disappear every morning when the sun comes up, but today, it’s getting special attention.”

We got to the middle of the field. The sun was starting to rise as a faint glow appeared along the horizon, lighting up the edges of the sky. My father’s upturned face became a dark silhouette against the shining heavens and I reached my arms upward, stretching out my fingers into the oncoming light that was beginning to fill the skies. Suddenly, it reversed itself. The world began to get dark again. I stood still, amazed. I took my father’s hand and held it until it the sky began to glow again, the light wiping out the darkness until everything was back to normal.

I was filled with awe. The experience had touched me in ways I could never articulate. In a child’s innocence, I saw that some things just happened the way they did and if we tried to make sense out of them and give them a name, the magic poured out and left a gaping hole.

The world can be a disappointing place at times. We are prone to making up negative stories and expecting the worst. But if you remind yourself to expect the best, if you tell yourself good stories instead of bad ones, there’s a good chance you’ll find the magic waiting in the wings.

I’m not talking about how a magician appears to saw a body in half. Make an elephant disappear. Pull a playing car out of your ear. I’m talking about the kind of magic that exists in the world around us. Many spiritual teachers believe that the greatest magic is not controlling the world but rather transforming oneself to find peace. You don’t have to look for it. Believing it’s there will automatically draw it to you. Pema Chodron describes magic as the sacredness, vastness and aliveness of the present moment. Writers, philosophers, and spiritual teachers have described “magic” not as a supernatural power, but as the result of believing in wonder, beauty, and mystery that is woven into ordinary life.

J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, said, “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.”

I was fourteen when I left my home in Massachusetts and moved to Washington, D. C. to study ballet. My mother found a school on Wisconsin Avenue in D. C. that offered ballet and academic subjects under the same roof, the first of its kind in America, and I wanted to be there, but my life as I knew it, was upended.

Many of the students lived at home but I was in a smaller group of girls from out of town. We stayed in a housing complex where a woman was meant to watch over us but I rarely saw her. My feelings of separation were extreme. I had hoped my mother would stay with me for a few weeks when I got there so I could adjust, but the idea of being on her own in a strange and busy city without my father must have been too scary for her. As a result, there was no one to settle me in. No one to help me with my homework. No way to fill in empty time. No one to comfort me so my father bought me a goldfish.

When my parents left that first afternoon, I stood in the middle of my small room and stared at my goldfish, unsure what to do with myself. Fourteen was a pretty young age to maneuver life on my own but I fell into a routine. I got up, I said good morning to Goldie, tapped food into her bowl and watched her swim around. She was supposed to make me feel less alone but she looked pretty isolated herself. I packed my dance bag, I went to the cafeteria for breakfast and I crossed the street to the school. I took a ballet class first thing in the morning, changed out of my sweaty leotard and tights into my gray school uniform, and went to math and French class. After lunch we had another ballet class and then we did English and geography and science.

In the evenings, I washed out my dance clothes, hung them on a wooden dryer rack, sewed new pink ribbons on my pointe shoes, did my homework (math was difficult for me) and I fell into bed. I made friends and I got reprieves, suspended moments of grace when I forgot about myself and my feelings and placed my focus on someone or something outside myself, but like a boomerang, no matter how far or hard I threw it, the loneliness always found its way back to me. Many mornings, I cried before I left my room. I wiped my eyes, left my room and pretended I was okay as I walked steadily and kept my head down. I felt ashamed because I hadn’t seen the other girls crying but they hadn’t seen me either. It’s possible to be lonely in a crowded room.

Two years later, when I moved from D.C. to Manhattan to apprentice with a professional ballet company, I was a highly trained ballet dancer, a young woman who knew how to take care of herself and a lonely young girl with a broken heart. I felt isolated and sad, I thought I was alone in those feelings, but a decade ago, I realized that even rock stars feel disconnected. I had the good fortune to attend a talk by the wildly famous drummer from that wildly famous Liverpool band. He said, “We’re all lonely but we can’t tell that to everybody we meet. When I pick up the dry cleaning and the woman behind the register asks me how I am, I can’t moan at her, ‘I’m lonely.’”

I see loneliness, not as something to be healed but rather something to be managed with kindness and compassion. It isn’t a moral failing or proof that something is wrong with you, but a normal human emotion that occurs when you crave connection. Whether you’re wildly famous or almost famous, married, single, have thousands of followers or shun social media altogether, most of us are members of The Lonely Hearts Club at some time or another and we’re all trying to fill in the gap.

There are choices. You can tighten up and push loneliness away, but that robs you of your peace. It leaves you feeling pressured and disconnected. Another choice is loosening up and making enough room in your being to accept loneliness as one of many human emotions. That choice can bring you peace. It’s possible to be lonely and peaceful at the same time.

Acknowledging that other people feel the same way that you do is a way to heal. The Dalai Lama says, “I have always considered myself as just one among billions of people in this world. Whenever you consider yourself special, you begin to feel lonely and you fall victim to depression.”

After a lifetime of trying to exile, abandon and throw loneliness aside, when it comes, I can try to snub it, eat through it, drown it, drug it, shoot it, burn it, run the car over it, steamroll it or fly it to the moon, but it isn’t going anywhere for very long. It’s ever faithful and no amount of praying, meditating, breathing or having sex will banish it forever. It’s like an annoying uncle who corners you at a family gathering, tells you sad stories you’ve heard a hundred times and you can’t seem to get away.

It’s important to be kind to yourself when you feel separate. Beating yourself up only makes you feel more abandoned than you already feel. Soothing yourself can make you feel like you’re a part of something or someone else.

Pema Chodon says, “When we feel lonely, cut off or rejected, we can regard what is happening as an opportunity to touch that very tender place in ourselves.”

“When my husband Stephen died, I was living in a remote place with no people around so I had to learn to hold my own hand.”

- - - Ondrea Levine

Loss shows up in a lot of different ways. A partner walks out on you. A close friend betrays your trust. You get fired from your job. Your favorite silk blouse goes missing. Your partner cheats on you. Your dog breathes his last breath. A loved one becomes ill and dies.

Whatever the loss, it hurts, and when you find yourself alone with your pain, you have to figure out how to hold your own hand as you walk the rocky path of healing your heart. I was five when my Great Aunt Ruth passed away. She had a large mole on the side of her chin and I loved her so much, I thought she was so beautiful, I believed it was a beauty mark. I looked at my face in the mirror each morning, hoping that a mole would show up on my chin. I wanted to be as beautiful as she was.

Aunt Ruth lived with us and every day, she and I took a walk to the neighborhood market where she bought me a piece of chocolate and we put a dime in the slot of a cardboard cutout for “The March of Dimes.” I was seven when she passed away from brain cancer and after my mother told me that she was gone, she went to her bedroom and closed the door. I sat there in shock. Neither of my parents asked me how I felt. They seemed to think I was too young to feel the loss and I was left painfully alone in my grief.

On the day of the funeral, I begged them to let me go with them. They said no. I watched them walk out of the house dressed in black and they left me behind with a depth of sorrow I didn’t understand. I had to find a way to cope so I put my aunt’s red suitcase in my closet, I rubbed her Jergen’s Lotion on my hands and I climbed into her bed so I could inhale her smell. That was my childhood version of holding my own hand.

However small it may be, when we lose something or someone, we deserve our own loving kindness. It almost embarrasses me to write the following, but at the time this mattered to me a great deal. I was twenty-one and I’d been married for several years to the wrong person but that’s a different story. We were living in England, managing a denim store in Brighton. I was young and insecure, I had judgments about my body and I remember rummaging through the latest arrivals of jeans when I found a pair of bell bottoms that fit me perfectly. I thought they made me look slim and I took them home and put them in my dresser. The next morning when I got up, I opened the dresser and they were gone. I called the shop where the “wrong person” was serving customers.

“What did you do with my jeans?” I asked him.

“We were out of stock and someone wanted them,” he said. “I sold them. You have plenty of jeans.”

I was hurt and angry, I felt betrayed, and then I began to feel loss. My husband didn’t understand how important those jeans were to my self-esteem and if I tried to explain, I knew he would make fun of me. I felt ashamed which only escalated my upset. We lived in an apartment in a cul de sac called Montpelier crescent and I climbed a huge elm tree, sat on a thick branch and cried silently while I watched people walking underneath me. They never looked up and saw me and the safety of the tree and the scent of the leaves soothed me. I was holding my own hand.

There are many ways to soothe ourselves and heal our pain. Listening to music, deep breathing, painting, dancing, writing, maybe even screaming and sobbing, anything that forces us to dig deeply into the center of our spirits to find compassion for ourselves and heal our hearts. No matter how chaotic and dramatic the situation, if you stay with your feelings and not abandon yourself, you’ll find a way to heal your wound.

I try to not attach shame to an already painful situation. I listen to myself, even if I don’t like what I’m hearing. I look at myself, even if I don’t like what I’m seeing. I feel the pain, even when I want to go numb and I do my best to stop judging myself for judging myself.

We’ll never get to a place where we don’t have loss. We are never too young or too old to feel the sting of it. It’s part of being human.

Composer and poet, Leonard Cohen, said, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Just like we feel bereft when a loved one dies, someone will feel the same way about us when it’s our time. I’ll never ask anyone not to grieve for me. It’s like asking someone not to feel. The most painful part of experiencing loss is when you don’t allow yourself to feel it. The willingness to be with loss wakes up compassion. And compassion heals.

If we keep our hearts open, grief will be our constant companion because everyone experiences loss. We turn to other people to help us but there isn’t always someone there who can understand what we’re going through. It isn’t always possible to tell someone how we feel, so we have to learn to soothe ourselves in the same way that we would soothe someone else whom we love. I’ve learned that healing comes from making room for everything to co-exist: grief, relief, joy and loss.

In his poem, “Servant to Servants,” Robert Frost stated quite simply, “The only way out is through.”

A woman I used to know, Cynthia, was in the business of helping celebrities prepare to be on camera for unscripted interviews. They were accustomed to performing in front of thousands of people, they had reached excellence in their craft, but unscripted appearances and interviews on talk shows were really hard for some of them. My friend would set up a mock camera, sit down with them, and she would ask probing questions about their careers and their private lives so they could learn to manage uncomfortable conversations. She advised them how to dress, how to sit, and how to appear relaxed when they were stressed out. How to smile when they were afraid. What to do with their hands, what to do with their legs and how to laugh at themselves.

Cynthia was in London in the early summer of 1997, when she got a call from Princess Diana’s assistant. He told her that the princess needed some help with her public appearances and he wondered if Cynthia could meet with her that afternoon. She was breathless, it was an extraordinary opportunity, but she was also intimidated. What would she say to her? What if she did a bad job and Diana was disappointed? She decided she needed some time to prepare. “I can’t do it today,” she said, “I’m flying home to Los Angeles. But I’ll be back in London next month and we can set something up.”

Diana was killed in a car crash two weeks later and Cynthia deeply regrets her decision. She knew how to prepare her clients for scary, uncomfortable situations but she couldn’t rise to the occasion herself. She had learned the hard way what happened when you let fear run the show.

I faced the same kind of fear when I got a call from my agent many years ago. He had signed a legendary diva for a memoir and she needed a ghostwriter. She booked a meeting with me to see if we were a good fit and during the fifty minute drive to her home, I decided four times that I should just back out. What if I embarrassed myself? What if I couldn’t get over her fame and talent? I repeated to myself, “Just show up. Just show up.” And that was what I did.

When I knocked on her front door, she answered it herself and when we smiled at each other, I saw a human being looking across at me. Not a diva. Not a super star. Not an Oscar winner. Not a Grammy winner. A human being, just like me. I let go of my preconceived notions and fears and the meeting went smoothly. When I got home, my agent called to tell me that it was a “go.” I was ecstatic.

“When do we start?” I asked him.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “She fired her last writer, he wasted a month of her time and now we have a very tight deadline.”

The next morning, two large Fed Ex boxes arrived at my door. They were filled with write-ups, articles and reviews that I had to put in some kind of order. I laid everything out on the floor, took a look and walked downstairs to my bedroom. I climbed into bed. In a flash, my ecstasy had morphed into hardcore reality. The celebration was over. Now I had to write the damned book with the shortest deadline you could imagine.

“Wow, I get to write this woman a memoir,” became, “Oh no, I have to write this woman a memoir.”

My fear started to choke me. “Just show up. Just show up,” I repeated over and over. In the end, it turned out to be a great experience. I conducted in-person interviews in three of her homes. I got to really know this legend of stage and screen. I got to know her personal chef, her chauffer, her husband and her family.

The book made the NY Times bestseller list and publishers hired me for other ghostwriting jobs. I went on to create a successful career for myself with numerous bestsellers, something that never would have happened if I hadn’t overcome my fear and just shown up.

Showing up despite your insecurities or your fear of mediocrity takes a lot of courage. The ladder to excellence is tall, you have to climb up rung by rung, and whether or not you make it to the top, the reward is putting your fears in the background and enjoying the ride.

I’ve learned many of my life lessons, not by professional training but rather by doing what was in front of me, no matter how scared I was. Painter, Georgia O Keefe, said, “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”

One of my favorite quotes is by Stephen King:

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work.”

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

. . . Maya Angelou

Creativity is making something out of nothing. I’m writing a book for an inspirational woman right now. I’ve written a lot of books for people over the years, some were wonderful and others not so much, but either way, I find a creative way to get to the heart of the matter, a way to create something that wasn’t here before. I talk about the theme with my client, I ask her what she has in mind for the book and what she wants people to take away from it once they’re finished reading it. Then I mull over it for a while.

I conduct interviews with the client and when I get home, I read them back. When I feel ready to write, I sit down and something magical happens. I lose myself. I mean that in the best way. It’s as if I disappear into a different world and I write from the inside out. That’s my form of creativity. That’s heaven for me. Time disappears and I listen to the hypnotic click of the keyboard as my thoughts fly onto the page. I don’t know where they come from as I write and delete and write and delete. I only know that after a while, I’m holding a book in my hands. I just made something out of nothing.

I also express my creativity by knitting beautiful sweaters and scarves. It starts with a pair of knitting needles and a skein of yarn. It ends with a cashmere sweater or a silk scarf. In the same way, when I hold a pelt of leather in my hands, it starts with a scissors and glue and it ends with a wallet or a fringed purse. It doesn’t matter how good the outcome is. It matters that you are flexing your creative muscles and making something that didn’t exist before.

We don’t always know what form our creativity will take. When you look inside, you may be surprised at what you find. I was working on a book with Magic Johnson when he told me that he had two aspirations when he was young. Basketball and business. He had spent his life working on both of them and he had been successful.

“You knew what you wanted to do from a young age,” I said. “What would you advise people who don’t know what they want to do?”

“I’d tell them to try everything until they find the one thing that really excites them,” he said.

We usually connect creativity to pieces of art, beautiful books, ballet performance and operas. But when you feel something knocking on your door and revving up your passion, expressing that is being creative. It’s like asking a bird, “How do you fly?” He just does. Steve Jobs said that creativity is about connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they say that they don’t know. They just saw it and brought it to life.

Maybe you’re expressing yourself in ways that you don’t recognize. My mother was an interesting example. She swore up and down that she wasn’t a creative person but I think she was wrong. Saving a buck was her creative expression and she was damned good at it. She certainly had plenty of practice.

When it was time to go shopping, she looked up sales, she cut out coupons, she researched the best prices for gas. She found designer clothing that was drastically marked down. She searched super markets in her area and she went from store to store, saving a nickel here, a quarter there. When she got up to the register to pay her bill, she kept a long line of people waiting while she pored over her coupons until she found the right ones. And when she was finished grocery shopping, she stood outside the store, going over the receipt to make sure there were no mistakes.

I once watched her successfully return something that wasn’t returnable. She dug her heels in and stood there until the clerk gave her a refund to get rid of her. She felt satisfied when she got back home. Even though she didn’t view it that way, this was her way of being creative in life.

If you see yourself as not being creative, then you won’t be. If you see yourself as being creative, you have some wonderful worlds to explore. Being creative is the act of bringing something new into the world. Something that didn’t exist before. It’s the act of using your imagination to generate new ideas, solve problems and find satisfaction in the process. I think it’s a skill, something you can practice and get good at. See what turns you on the most and go for it. No judgments. No comparisons. No thoughts about success or failure.

We all have different expressions that exercise our minds and open our hearts. With creativity, life is filled with hope and possibility. Without it, life feels grim and tedious. Just enjoy the process and see what you can do to express yourself in an individual way.

Albert Einstein said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

I had a good day yesterday. I had a productive writing session and I met a friend for dinner in our favorite restaurant. When she and I hugged good-bye, I was happy. I felt satisfied. I felt like my life was a good place to be – until I got about half way home and I could feel my mind pulling me down. I was in the process of editing a book. What if I did a bad job and the author didn’t like it? I had ordered some new clothes from Amazon. What if I had gained weight and they didn’t fit?

The closer I got to home, the worse it became until I was as unhappy as I had been happy a short time ago. I walked into the house and checked my phone. A politician I had never heard of had sent me a text designed to scare me into donating money to her. If she lost, she said, I would be in grave danger. She alone could make me safe in an unsafe world. No one else could do the job.

I deleted the text and sat there feeling frightened and insecure. Nothing on the outside had changed since I had dinner. What was true an hour ago was still true. But on the inside, I had taken a dive and I was suffering because of what I was telling myself.

I attended a lecture by the late spiritual leader, Baba Ram Dass some years ago. This is the gist of one of the stories he told:

I checked the stock market yesterday and all my numbers were up. I felt wealthy and clever for investing so wisely. I deserved a reward. I loved a particular kind of muffin they sold at a bakery near my house. It was expensive for a muffin but why not get one? Or two? I had plenty of money.

I walked to the bakery feeling happy. I could already taste the treat I was about to give myself. When I stepped inside, the aroma of freshly baked bread filled the air. I headed to the counter but just before I got there, I saw a stack of newspapers to my left. The headline said, “Stock Market Crash.”

My stomach sunk. I was a loser. How could I have invested in something so risky? I didn’t deserve a reward. I left the bakery without the muffins. I felt deflated and depressed.

Ram Dass had told himself stories that were both good and bad and neither was true. Someone asked him, “Is this Armageddon and everything is about to end or is this the Age of Aquarius and everything is beginning?”

“I don’t know and I don’t need to know,” he said. “Whichever it is, my work is the same.

Quiet my mind.

Open my heart.

Relive suffering wherever I can. That includes relieving it in myself.”

If you choose to do the hard work of allowing yourself to stay awake to what’s really going on without trying to push it away, your suffering will ease up. You don’t have to change yourself or anyone else. You can’t. You just need to stay present with it and it will change. That’s the only thing we can be sure of – everything changes whether we want it to or not.

In the Harry Potter books, there is a prison called Azkaban. There are no bars or locked doors. They don’t need them. Wraith-like creatures called Dementors float above the prison, emitting darkness that causes the prisoners so much depression and despair, they are rendered incapable of finding a way out.

If you spend your time trying to fix yourself and trying to change the things you can’t change, your suffering will escalate until you’re a miserable puddle of pain and sorrow. This is what our negative thoughts do to us.

Of the four Noble truths that make up the core of Buddhism, the first is:

There is suffering in the world.

While we can’t change the fact that suffering exists, we can change our reaction to it. If we decide not to feel pain, we’ve also decided not to feel joy. Not to feel anything. Instead, we can give ourselves permission to feel what’s right here, right now. The truth won’t kill us. We don’t need to try and fix what’s broken. That isn’t possible. But we can find a way to relax into what is, and allow life to take its course.

The only way out is in. When we stop feeling superior or inferior, when we actually feel curious about how we are without trying to change ourselves, we have a chance to suffer less. That’s the real reward we can give ourselves. That is the path to inner peace.

Some years ago, I was hiking in Ojai, California, when I came upon a crashing waterfall. It pounded against a scattering of boulders that had been polished over time into smooth surfaces. Bright green moss grew between the rocks and long arced branches of white oak trees shaded the area. I gazed at the flowing water, the sound was hypnotic, as my mind and body became still and quiet. I was drawn to get closer to the water. I stepped forward and my feet sunk into a muddy patch of earth up to my ankles. I stepped back quickly. My feet were drenched up to my socks in mud and I brushed my shoes against a rock, trying to get the clumps of dirt off. How would I continue the rest of the hike like this? I wished I hadn’t stopped to look at the waterfall. The mud had ruined everything. I shouldn’t have been walking so close to the rocks. I should have known better. I was judging myself for not looking where I was going when I had a vision.

In my mind’s eye, I saw a judge in long black robes, sitting at his bench with a gavel in his hand. With every thought I had, he banged the gavel on his desk and said, “That’s good. Or that’s bad.” Over and over. He was passing judgment on everything I was thinking. It made my head hurt. I felt anxious and I sat down on a large flat rock. My mind was working overtime.

Author Anne Lamott wrote, “My mind is a bad neighborhood I try not to go into alone.”

Judging never ends well and I knew what I had to do. I addressed the judge out loud. “Thanks for your input but I don’t need you right now. Why don’t you go into your chambers, pour yourself a brandy and I’ll call you when I need you?”

He looked disappointed. It was as if I heard him say, “Are you sure? Who’ll let you know if you’re thinking clearly?”

I repeated myself. “Go into your chambers, pour yourself a brandy and I’ll call you when I need you.”

I watched him put down the gavel and walk out of the courtroom. He was gone and so was my anxiety. I took off my socks and I sat for a while. My mind was quiet. All I could hear was the lull of the waterfall, lightly splashing against the rocks. I felt peaceful . . . until my mind began to stray. It bobbed and weaved all over the place. It was like an orangutan, frenetically jumping from tree branch to tree branch, never stopping anywhere. It replayed conversations. Had I said the right thing? I thought about pieces I’d written. Were they good or bad? It felt like I had a committee in my head, judging everything I did or said. Good or bad? Right or wrong?

That was the judge’s cue. The door to the bench opened and he came rushing back in. He was breathless. “Do you need me now?” he said. He grabbed his gavel, getting ready.

“Not now,” I said.

“Are you sure? It looks like you could use a little help.”

“I really don’t,” I said.

And he was gone again.

I don’t know about you but if I let my mind loose, I find myself judging a lot of the time. I think it’s human nature but it’s painful and it leaves me feeling badly about myself. I can’t do everything right, whatever “right” means, but I can become aware of my thoughts and keep bringing myself back to my breath. I can become aware of what I’m thinking and learn about what works for me and what doesn’t. Even though my mind seems to drift naturally into a painful place, I can investigate my thoughts and I can change my mind and pull it back. It’s simple but it isn’t easy to stop blaming, shaming and judging. When you judge yourself, you’re causing yourself unnecessary harm. When you judge someone else, it doesn’t define who they are. It defines who you are.

I think that when we judge other people, we’re trying to justify our own behavior. We are trying to prove ourselves right when there is no right or wrong. We can punish ourselves endlessly for everything we do, we can feel anxious and fearful, or we can forgive instead, and find some peace and understanding in what feels like an upside down world.

When you graduate from this realm into the next, if you could leave one gift to the ones you love, what would it be? People leave letters for their families, videos, favorite articles of clothing, cherished artifacts or homes and cars and money. These things are wonderful and they are tangible. They have weight, they spark memories. But if you could pick something intangible about yourself that would live on in someone else’s heart, what would you choose? What pearl of knowledge or wisdom would you want to leave behind? What would you like to be remembered for? What was your life about that you want to place in the hands of your survivors?

This pondering brings to mind a gift that a friend named Isa left me. She was 62, she was dying from cancer, it had been a long journey and she had been in a lot of pain. When it was clear that Isa’s time was up, a few friends and I gathered at her bedside. She was on morphine which she had decided to keep at a minimum so she could stay conscious. A woman she had known for years, they had walked a spiritual path together, sat on a chair and read passages aloud from the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. We were sitting on Isa’s bed when she lifted up her head and said, “I’m not ready to go yet.” She looked slightly troubled and we let her know that the timing was up to her. We would stay with her. She relaxed, closed her eyes, and dropped into a meditative state. We all breathed with her.

About twenty minutes later, Isa opened her eyes, they were bright and alive, and she said, “Oh, this isn’t so bad.” She died in the next moment. When she said those words, “Oh, this isn’t so bad,” she gave me and her other friends a glimpse into the possibility that dying was not so bad. In fact, it might be okay. I cried sad tears at the loss of her but I also cried tears of hope. She had given me a gift about the greatest mystery of life. Hope about death. I decided then and there that if it was in my power to remain conscious when I died and offer my people a final gift of hope like Isa did, I would do that. To me, that was the greatest thing that anyone could offer and if it was at my fingertips, I wanted to give it away.

Back in the eighties and nineties when AIDS was surging, I did volunteer work at a group hospice. I went to a there one day a week, I went from room to room and I saw that everyone dies in a different way. Some people die scared and others are peaceful. Some people are in great pain and they need heavy doses of morphine and others die in their sleep. Some people die holding a loved one’s hand and some people wait until they’re alone. There is no right or wrong way, no worse or better way to die. We are all on our own paths, we have all lived our lives differently, we have had different lessons to learn, and we have no idea where, when or how we’ll die. But if I have a choice, I’d like to leave people some hope and soothing when I breathe my last breath.

I have observed that acknowledging and accepting impermanence is at the forefront of most of the Buddhist teachings. But focusing on and obsessing about death is not the point. Whatever is alive will die. Existence works that way and we can’t change it. We can stay in great physical shape. We can exercise our minds and we can make our faces look younger, but we can’t change our expiration dates. All we can do is try to make peace with it since there is no escaping the inevitable.

For me, acknowledging that makes me want to live life more fully because no matter what religion we follow, whether or not we believe in a higher power, which exercises we do and what we think comes next, we just don’t know when or how it will happen. We might as well enjoy our time here. I was lucky to have been there with Isa as she made her transition. It was a rare opportunity to be present with her and receive the lessons she was offering on her way out.

Sitting at someone’s death bed is rigorous and requires a great deal of letting go and keen focus. “Isn’t it depressing?” someone asked me.

“No,” I said, “not at all. In fact, I never feel as alive as I do when I witness someone leaving their body.”

I have held hands, prayed, breathed and listened when someone made the inevitable journey from the physical world into the vastness of the universe. It has always been a gift but the greatest one I ever received was what Isa left behind. Hope. Less fear. Great possibility. The idea that dying might really be okay.

Death and dying expert Stephen Levine said, “Dying is perfectly safe. Everyone is doing it.”