#Trust30 Day 1: 15 minutes

#Trust30 is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself. Use this as an opportunity to reflect on your now, and to create direction for your future. 30 prompts from inspiring thought-leaders will guide you on your writing journey

Here is today’s writing prompt:

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

(Author: Gwen Bell)

I have never been one to think about the end of my life too much. I am almost assured to find my life wanting at the end, as I always want to do so much. There is a finite limit to the number of hours, minutes, seconds in a day and I end each day feeling much the same way. There is always much more that needs to be done and much more I want to do.

That said, I find joy i the smallest accomplishments of my day. A few, well-crafted words, a newly neatened flower bed in the garden, a great, homemade meal shared with my family. I think it is important to notice and enjoy these small successes each day so that you have energy to keep working toward the larger goals. We all need some sense of accomplishment, even when engaged in the “greater battle” of life. Without the celebration of small successes, we risk falling down the well of depression and despair when we face the roadblocks inherent in larger projects.

Big projects are difficult, simply because they are big. They encompass many concepts, many people, many ideas and many challenges. They should be hard. To expect them to be otherwise is a bit naive. We know better, but sometimes we think we will simply breeze through a project solely on our own brilliance and bravado. This leaves us wide open to disappoint when we hit the inevitable roadblocks, mis-starts and downright awful days that every big project entails.

If anything is to be said of my life and the end, I hope it is that I tried — a lot. This will also mean I have failed a lot, but also, hopefully, that I have succeeded a lot, as well. Whether those successes are large or small, I think they all add up to a well-lived life. As Socrates supposedly said, “an unexamined life is not worth living”. I examine my life everyday in large ways and small and each day I notice good things which arise from it, through it, in it.

I hope that you find your life the same. If not, perhaps you need to examine your life a but further and find those things that have the most meaning to you. You can’t, and shouldn’t, live someone else’s life or allow them to live, control, direct yours. You are in there — or perhaps out there, somewhere. You only need to find it

 

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