“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Ernest Hemingway

If you think Twitter is abbreviated communication, how about this one: can you tell your entire life story in exactly six words?

Welcome to the Six Word Memoir Project, birthed from the brain and heart of Larry Smith, founder and editor of SMITH magazine, an online repository for people’s personal stories.

Although the project is over three years old, I somehow managed to remain unaware of it until last week at the gym, where I saw a woman wearing a tee-shirt that said: www.sixwordmemoir.com on the back. Such an intriguing concept! Assuming there was more to the story, I couldn’t wait to see what was on the front of her shirt.

Being that I was moving in place on the elliptical and she was moving around the circuit on the machines, I didn’t manage to catch up with her until just as I was leaving the gym. The front of her shirt read: “The psychic said I’d be richer”.

OK, I was hooked and had to learn what this was. From our brief exchange, I learned that Larry Smith, a friend of hers and former articles editor at Men’s Journal, took an old idea inspired by Ernest Hemingway, who was challenged to write a story using only six words. Hemingway’s story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Whew! I don’t know about you, but that one kind of leaves me speechless. Don’t those six words capture the essence of an entire journey through the joy of expectation to the sorrow of loss? Or maybe it tells the story of someone who changed their mind about starting a family and took their life in a different direction. Or it could be the story of someone who never experienced their own childhood or who never walked in another’s shoes.

The possibilities for interpretation are endless, thus inviting readers to supply their own imaginations in bringing meaning to each offering.

In 2006, Smith took Hemingway’s idea, launched an online magazine and challenged people to submit a six word memoir, offering an iPod to the winner. He expected to receive maybe a few hundred entries. He was immediately deluged with over 11,000 entries.

Today, over 250,000 six word memoirs have been submitted, and the idea has become a cultural phenomenon, spawning a best selling book series, including Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure, Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure. and It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.

Distilling your life’s story into only six words is challenging. Want to try it? Let’s have our own little contest and see what we produce. Here are some examples that are among my favorites:

“Don’t make me come down there.” – God (seen on a church billboard)
“The miserable childhood leads to royalties” – Frank McCourt, author
“Life is better in soft pajamas”- from a 3rd grader in New Jersey
“Now I obsessively count the words” – Larry Smith, editor of SMITH magazine
“Three marriages; three divorces; gratefully single.” Judith Rich
” I finally came home to myself.” Judith Rich (OK, I cheated and did 2).

OK, it’s your turn. Let’s hear what you got. If you want more inspiration, visit the 6WM Facebook page and see what readers like yourself come up with everyday.

And if you want to submit your own memoir as a possible entry in a future collection, check out SMITH magazine and indoctrinate yourself in this world of possibilities. There are six word categories for moms, teens, relationships, heart break, politics, Oscars, Olympics, and many more and the list keeps on growing.

Maybe you could start a category of your own. The nominations are open for new categories and if enough of you are interested, we’ll explore them in future posts. What’s new and happening right now and how can we distill it into six words?

For example: Healthcare: “I told you I was sick.”

The floor is all yours. Have fun with this and blessings on the path.

Follow Dr. Judith Rich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dr_judithrich

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The Grandpuppy

Meet Nikita, the newest addition to the family.  She’s a rescue dog, part Vischla, part Pitt, and part mystery.  She was adopted by my daughter and her husband at 8 weeks, about the time of this photo.  Nikita is now 8 months old and considerably larger than this picture, but she’s still true to her cute puppy nature.

Every Friday, I drive into the city (San Francisco) and collect Nikita,  a bag of her goodies (food, toys, leashes, etc.) and we trundle off to the other side of the bay to spend a day playing together.  I don’t know who looks forward to our outings more, she or I.

I spent 15 years raising dogs and being owned by my pets, but that chapter concluded over 10 years ago.  When the last pet died, I swore I’d completed my duty to ever own another one.  So now I just “rent” my grandpuppy.  Isn’t that what grandparents get to do?  Not having any human grandchildren (yet), I’m getting in practice for that possibility down the road, should I be so lucky.

Meanwhile, my weekly outings with Nikita have brought me back full circle to the olden days, when my 4 dogs were central players in my life.  I’m reminded of how our pets just love us unconditionally, no matter what.  I’m reminded of how their curiosity never seems to wane, that just around the corner is something new to sniff, and a whole new adventure awaits.

Pets can bring us joy and they can break our hearts.  Just like people.  We endow them with human traits and they come to know how to get what they want from us.  It’s a mutual admiration/inspiration/and sometime, frustration society.

Having to put 3 of my 4 dogs to sleep at the end of their lives was such a bitter sweet experience, I didn’t think I could ever open my heart to love another animal that way again.  And then along came Nikita and all bets were off.  Animals can soften a crusty, old heart in ways few humans can.  Or so it seems.

And so Nikita is teaching this old dog a few new tricks.  I’m even learning to let go of the leash and trust that love could come around again and she is living proof.  Who knows?  Maybe she’s helping me to open up a new chapter I thought I’d closed forever.  Now THAT would be transformative!

We never know in what form our teachers or our lessons come.  Our job is to stay open and willing and not be attached to how it looks.  And so it goes………

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Check out this 15 year old  phenom, Mark Vincent, on Australia’s Got Talent.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Don’t you just wonder how many more extraordinarily talented young people there are like Mark, just warming up in the wings?   For all we lament about the deterioration of today’s youth, consider that inside each of them and even us oldsters, is a gift just waiting to be developed and expressed.

What gift are you giving today?

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“What it takes to be a Tiger…. seeing things simply, seeing things fully.”

Watching Tiger Woods’ public apology today was painful.  Like the ad says, too bad he lost his ability to see.

I got the feeling he felt like a schoolboy who’d been marched to the principal’s office and forced to write “I was wrong and irresponsible” 100 times on the chalkboard before submitting to a paddling at the hands of the three schoolmarms seated in the front row.

How would you like to conjure up the darkest, most despicable things you’ve ever done and confess to them on national TV with your mother sitting right in front of you?  Come on now!  Don’t you think you might look as bewitched, bothered and bewildered as Tiger did?

Many things  struck me watching Tiger squirm through his press conference .  I thought of the myth of Icarus and his father, Daedalus, imprisoned on the Isle of Crete.  Daedalus fashioned wings out of feathers and wax for the two of them so they could fly away to safety, but he warned Icarus not to fly to low to the sea lest the water get his wings wet or too close to the sun lest its heat melt the wax.

Icarus, being the Puer type that he was,was overcome with the thrill of flying.  He kept flying higher and higher until he flew very close to the sun.   The heat of the sun melted the wax and all the feathers were lost.  Icarus  plunged to the sea and was killed.

Like Icarus, Tiger, intoxicated with fame and fortune, thought the rules didn’t apply to him.  He felt he could fly as high as he wanted and that somehow the sun’s heat would make an exception.  He thought he could betray his core values, leave behind the spiritual path he’d followed since birth and “follow every temptation” with impunity.

It’s like that when we think we’re entitled. The essence of the word, “en-titled” infers that we convey a title to ourselves to do whatever we want regardless of the impact on others.  In fact, thinking of others is the farthest thing from our minds when we’re caught in the trap of entitlement.

All of us have been there.  I do not throw stones.  I count my own chapters of entitlement to be among my least best moments.  The fall always comes.  We can look across the landscape of contemporary life and see a battlefield strewn with the bodies of the formerly entitled and the unfortunate people they took with them.

Professional athletes seem to have more than their share of representatives, but they probably don’t outnumber politicians, tel-evangelists, Hollywood celebrities, corporate executives and our favorites; financial advisers (can you say Bernie Madoff?)

In some cases, the fall is merely public humiliation.  The entitled  take their humiliation in stride and use it to keep on going.  Larry Craig still holds his seat in Congress.  Kobe Bryant still leads the Los Angles Lakers.  Mark Sanford is still the governor of South Carolina. Today, a “fallen” celebrity or official can quit their job, write a book,  go on tour, become a pundit on Fox News and make millions of dollars.  Some even consider running for president.

But for others among the ranks of the entitled the price is much higher.  John Edwards has ruined his career as a politician and it looks like his 33 year marriage to Elizabeth is coming to an end as well.   Edwards’ arrogance and entitlement may just end up winning a Pulitzer Prize for that icon of superior journalism , The National Inquirer.   How’s that for irony?

Arrogance and entitlement, while producing temporary gratification, ultimately will serve to undo.   Call it what you will; karma, the law of cause and effect, one way or another, sooner or later, the guard at the gate will exact its toll and the piper will demand payment.   The scales will be balanced.

I believe in second chances, even third and fourth ones.  Tiger is right, he does have work to do.  I wish him well.  May his Buddhist faith serve to put him on his righteous path.  May he learn the lessons of humility, integrity, and responsibility and earn back his own self respect and self trust,  and hopefully that of his loved ones.   May he look back on this experience and say this is where he truly became a man of honor.

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I wander my wilderness with faith and suddenly it blossoms as the rose.

Florence Scovel Shinn

My mother  lived to the ripe old age of 91, but maintained to her death that a woman should never reveal her age.   I always thought it odd that one should not honor the years they’ve been on the planet and the wisdom gained from their journey.  So in the name of breaking free from my conditioning, today, I celebrate my 68th birthday and 68 years of lessons learned thus far.

As a child, I used to think people this age were really old, and back then, they were.  Sixty-eight years ago, the average life expectancy was only about 68.  Today, the average life expectancy is just shy of 78.  Looked at from this vantage point, I can expect to live 10 more years at least, perhaps even longer given my family longevity genes.

On the other hand, I all I really know is that I have this moment in which to be fully alive.  So let me take this moment to express my deep gratitude to the miracle that is Life,  and my life lived within this larger context.  In these difficult times, it’s easy to get caught up in what’s not right with the world.  It’s easy to see one’s life as a piece of “wilderness” stretching into infinity.  And in a way, this analogy fits pretty well for me.

My life is a kind of wilderness, but I imagine it to be a wilderness of wonder, a wilderness of beauty, a wilderness of miracles and rich possibility instead of a barren desert.

If I only have this day in which to complete my life, let me be the rose that blossoms in its fullness.  Let me share the fragrance of gratitude for this one, rich, wonderful life I call mine.

And so it is!

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“Leap and the net will appear”

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

It’s now mid-February. The decade is nearly two months old. Have your New Year’s resolutions gone the way of the trash heap yet? Have you’ve settled into your old patterns and back to business as usual?

Perhaps this time you thought you could sneak by the guard at the gate without ponying up. Maybe you thought you could put off facing your fears and taking on your life and just stay safe on the sidelines. But isn’t that what you’ve already done? Isn’t that why you made those resolutions in the first place? Remember, you said this was the year you were going to (fill in the blank)?

Here’s a novel idea: What if you just busted yourself and went for it anyway? What if you just cut through all the nonsense, retired your stories about why you can’t or why it’ll never work or why it’s not the right time or why the universe isn’t supporting you, etc., and just jumped!

Leap…….. and the net will appear!

What if Julia Cameron is right? What if that’s really the way it works? You declare, without evidence, your intention, and then you take action, as in leaping, and the way then becomes apparent. What have you got to lose, besides the illusion of safety and security and your warm seat on the bench?

I know, you want to see the net before you leap. But what if the path ahead doesn’t show itself until you’ve demonstrated your commitment and willingness to go for it, be uncomfortable, be inconvenienced, and like the Nike ad says, “Just do it“!

Let’s face it: if the pull of your history is stronger than your willingness to manifest a different future, you’ll stay right where you are. So if you’re telling yourself you want a different result and it’s not happening, look to see if what you’re really committed to is holding on to your story.

Human beings are master story tellers, you know. It’s our nature. Life happens and we make up a story about it. We are that we are interpreting life’s events every moment. So far, so good.

But here’s where things start to get tricky….. (It seems there’s usually a point where things start to get tricky, have you noticed that?) I guess if it were all straightforward and easy, we’d all have it all figured out and everybody would be enlightened and we’d all go on about our merry little way.

The tricky part

We’re so masterful at bringing meaning to the moment, we don’t even know we’re doing it. The process is transparent to us, we do it instantaneously. Thus:We forget that we’re making it up! Then we proceed to live our lives as if our stories are the truth! We collapse what actually happens in our lives into the stories we tell ourselves about what happens.

It’s like baking a cake. You fold all the ingredients into the mix and you can no longer distinguish the flour from the sugar from the butter, from the eggs. Put it in the oven and bake it for say, 20-30 years or more, ( How long you’ve been polishing up your story?) and your cake becomes an impenetrable rock. That’s how our stories become our truths. Repeated long enough and often enough, we lose sight of the facts and are left with our perceptions, masquerading as facts.

The Good/Bad News

OK, you say. So if we’re meaning making machines, what’s the alternative? If my nature is to interpret and make meaning of everything, how do I not make things up? How can I know the truth?

Ahhh, now we’re getting somewhere.

Here’s the bad news: You can’t not interpret. You’re always going to make up a story about what happens. That’s the way it is with us humans.

Here’s the good news…… You can make up anything you want. So why not make up a story that empowers you to go forward? As the storyteller, you’re the one who chooses the plot, the characters, the subplots, the action, etc. You can make it up however you want.

What is the truth?

You might not like this…. but the truth is whatever you say it is. You’re the one who invests your energy in being right about whatever you think is true. Why not be right about a choice that forwards your life? You might fall, yes. Your life didn’t come with a money back guarantee. You got a ticket to ride. That’s it. People fall sometimes and skin their knees or even their hearts.

Not to be crass, but so what? As Russell Bishop wrote in his post last week, sometimes our biggest challenges are also our biggest teachers. So don’t be afraid to learn. The only real failure is living your life in such a way that when you reach the end, you look back and are filled with regrets about never having gone for it.

I have leapt with no net in sight more times than I can count. Sometimes, the chasm has been so wide, I’ve been air born for years! I’ve had lots of time during flight to second guess and re-think my decision to leap, but since I’d already gone for it, I needed to become creative and figure out how to land.

Sometimes I’ve stuck the landing like an Olympic gymnast. Other times, I’ve barely made the net, catching it with a hangnail. Still other times, I’ve missed the net on the first pass, hit the ground and bounced back up making the net on the second pass and still have the bruises to show for it! But I wouldn’t trade those bruises for the a life lived on the sidelines with a clean uniform and perfectly groomed nails.

Would you rather stay safe or risk being free?

The choice is really yours. Just ask yourself, “Is the way my life is now the way I want it to be?” If your answer is “Yes, I don’t want to change a thing“, bravo to you, and enjoy the ride.

But if you’ve come to a place in the road where the current path you’re on no longer serves you, if you feel you’ve outgrown your stories and they now only constrain you, it’s time to bring those stories to an end and write a new one that opens the door to freedom.

Write down all the stories you’re ready to conclude. Put them in a fireproof bowl and set them on fire or put them through the shredder. Be prepared for your ego to jump up and down, frantically wave its arms and urgently warn you against doing this. Its job is to keep these stories alive and installed on the hard drive of your life. Delete them and you’re robbing the ego of one of its major duties. You’ll have to figure out some other job for it like, chopping wood, carrying water and making sure all the socks come out of the dryer.

And then go for it. Go for it because you can. Go for it because you must. Go for it because it’s who you are. Go for it because it’s why you came to the planet. Go for it because it’s what the world needs.

Going for it is pulling out all the stops, throwing off the shackles, aligning with your higher self, attuning with your true nature, and saying “yes” to all the above. It’s stepping off the cliff before you can see the net and creating whatever is needed to have you make it to the other side of the chasm.

Maybe you’ll end up inventing a whole new technology for how human beings can get from here to there. Lord knows we could use a few new ideas.

What leap have you not been taking? What story have you used to keep from leaping? What leap did you take and how did the net appear? Thanks for sharing your thoughts and comments below.

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Ask me a question. Any question. Whatever the question, the answer is Love.

Forgive me if that sounds simplistic, or even downright New Agey. Twenty years ago, if you’d asked me to say the answer to everything is love I’d have smiled semi-politely and rolled my eyes vigorously in both directions. My life’s journey had taught me to be cynical about love and I certainly didn’t trust it. Well, not the romantic variety at least. But I was young and naive and didn’t yet know the truth about love.

Granted, looking at ground zero of the world today, it certainly doesn’t look like love is the answer. Love won’t make the mortgage payment or keep the bank from foreclosing on your home. Love won’t make losing your job any easier and the last time I checked, no matter how much you might love your utility company, it won’t keep the lights on and the house warm if you don’t pay the bill.

What’s love got to do with helping to keep you afloat if your life is crumbling, or find another job if you’ve lost yours? Is love still relevant in today’s troubled world?

We’ll get back to this in a moment. But before we travel this road any further, what exactly are we talking about when we talk about love? Or as the song says, “What is this crazy thing called love?”

Having asked this question of myself, I immediately consulted that great oracle of information we wonder how we ever lived without: Google. Not much clarity there; only 1,420,000,000 pages (that’s 1 billion 420 million pages) devoted to the subject. No wonder we’re all so confused! So many opinions and points of view! So much certainty; so much mystery. It seems none of us knows precisely what love is. That leaves lots of room for us mere mortals to try to define the undefinable.

It’s taken me a lifetime to come to my own understanding about this subject. I grew up thinking love was a special feeling that applied only to certain special people and some very special things, like chocolate for example. Or husbands, wives, children, parents, friends and pets. You get the idea.

But love defined as a feeling doesn’t quite work for me. Sometimes I don’t always feel the love for the things or people I love. And in those times, I don’t question its presence, I accept it as a truth that needs no demonstration.

Still other times in my life, whatever I thought was love at the time, no longer felt the same. My feelings changed and the experience of love was gone. That’s the nature feelings. They’re transient. They come and go. So if love is a feeling, it’s way too fickle for me to trust it enough to put a stake in the ground and proclaim it as truth. Feelings can change like the weather. Surely, if love is this great thing, worthy of over 1 billion Google pages, it has to be more substantial than clouds passing through the sky.

Or does it? Maybe that’s exactly what love is … clouds passing through the sky. Or the sky itself. Or the universe that holds the sky. Or what holds the universe in place. Now this is beginning to feel more like it. Love has got to be something pretty damned spectacular to be the inspiration of billions of songs and poems and the primary subject of the world’s oldest and greatest teachings.

As I approach another birthday next week, with the numbers mounting up and beginning to look downright scary, I wonder what I’ve learned about love up until now. Surely someone who’s lived as long as I have must have a more mature perspective about love than what we read on a Hallmark card or see on The Bachelor. (May I digress for one sentence and just ask: is this not the lamest Bachelor season ever? Talk about an immature idea of what love is! OK, that was two sentences.)

Here’s what I’ve come with up so far. I’d love to hear your thoughts and insights too.

Love is more than something we feel or something we do. Love is what we are. Love is who we are. Capital “L” Love does not come and go. It is a constant. It is eternal. It is the stuff of what we and the rest of the universe are made.

Love doesn’t turn its back on us, it is we who do the turning away. Love never questions us. It is we who doubt love. We think we seek love, but it is Love that is seeking us. Love needs and uses us to be its expression, although sleeping babies, puppies, flowers and waterfalls can get the job done pretty well too.

The opposite of love is not hate; it is fear. So the next time you feel afraid, ask yourself “What would Love do now?” Seriously! Try it and see how your outlook changes. That question alone has gotten me through some pretty challenging moments.

Dr. David Hawkins, MD, Ph.D., researcher and psychiatrist, author of Power Vs. Force: An Anatomy of Consciousness, developed a method to quantify states of consciousness and measure the vibration of each state. Dr. Hawkins defines Love as a state of consciousness that on a calibration scale of 1-1000, vibrates at a 500 level. According to Hawkin’s research in this area, the average vibration of the collective at this moment in our history is 207, the level where integrity is just beginning to advance. Only four percent of the world’s population vibrates at a 500. Must be those sleeping babies, since the rest of us seem considerably “off” in this regard.

So what’s love got to do with it? Nothing less than everything. If only four percent of the world is vibrating at a 500 level, it seems the greatest gift any of us could give is to elevate ourselves beyond the influence that dominates the lower vibrations of shame, guilt, blame, anger, and fear and to become the purring cat and the dog with the wagging tail.

To all lovers everywhere; lovers of life and all it embodies, celebrate Love this Valentine’s day and beyond, and know Love is who you are. Go ahead and wag your tail and purr a bit louder. You might just infect the people around you and we’ll all end up looking like the Na’vi people of Pandora. Now wouldn’t be so bad, would it? I think they were on to something …

Does Love need you as much as you might think you need it? Drop by the comment section and let us know what you think about love. We might even add a few more Google pages!

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