Letters To My Son

I made my fair share of bad choices. And some of those bad choices resulted in nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. But those were the best lessons.

I remember a story that retired Admiral William McRaven told about his experience while he was training to be a frog man, a navy seal. It is a story of courage, persistence, resilience, and hope.

The pain I feel in difficult times it’s the same pain you feel in difficult times. The triggers are different, the circumstances are different, the degree of pain is different, but the process is the same.

Respect yourself, enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy.

You can learn new things at any time in your life if you’re willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you. With every roadblock, a detour is built. With every ending, a new beginning is defined.

It’s never too late. Things change. People change. Don’t you dare give up. Be patient. Be a light, not a judge.

Whatever you had the chance to do yesterday, won’t come back. But you have this moment. You have this chance to do something great with this life that you have been given.

You understood what you had to do. You didn't wait for anybody. You didn't wait for anyone to rescue you. You knew what had to be done. And you did it.

The best day of your life is the one in which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours.

“We can decide to live gratefully, courageously, open to life in all its fullest. By living the gratefulness, we don’t feel, we begin to feel the gratefulness we live”.

“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: it’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance”.

Maybe you’re young and brimming with ambition. Maybe you’re young and you’re struggling. Maybe you’re stunned to find out how empty it is at the top. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.

Rewarding movement is how your brain and body encourage you to participate in life. If you are willing to move, your muscles will give you hope. Your brain will orchestrate pleasure.

“Acceptance is best understood, as non-resistance to reality. Try as you may, no one can make an event that has already happened not have happened”.

What do you need to start doing? What do you need to stop doing? What do you need to continue doing? Right now, is the most important day of your life because you’re living it, the most important day of your life, because it ends in Y (WHY).

People like to imagine that they will “rise to the occasion”. In all truth, people rarely do. What happens, in fact, is that when things get really hard and people are really afraid, they sink to the level of their training. You train your habits. And if a critical moment does come, all you can be is ready for it.

As you replay the best moments from this week, realize there are wins buried inside of every single day that we might not notice, unless we take time to reflect. Whatever it is you have coming up this week, you’re prepared for it.

If the odds of being alive, living, breathing are one in 400 trillion, you won. You have, as you’re listening to this, already done the miraculous. So why not cash in?

Are you crazy enough to trust yourself while the world thinks you’re a little nuts? What are your crazy dreams? What are the really big dreams? What would you dare to dream if you knew you were guaranteed to succeed?

Consider your first paycheck, and how big it seemed then. Or your first apartment, with its own bedroom and bathroom and the Ramen, you gladly scarfed down in the kitchen. Today, as you’ve become more successful, these conditions would hardly feel sufficient.

“The turning point in anybody’s life is when you come to that fork in the road where you have to decide whether to risk your life or to lose your conscience. One road leads up, one down”.

Sometimes we need to climb an actual hill, pull ourselves up, or work together to shoulder a heavy load to know that these traits are a part of us.

“Life can make a selfish, skew our priorities, towards work, wealth, and image. Our character, the qualities that make us most human, most able to fit well into society, can be diminished by the trappings of modernity”.

This is the Resilience podcast Sunday Affirmation and Visualization practice where we AFFIRM, REFLECT and LOOK AHEAD to the coming week.

Maybe it’s time to write that letter that you’ve held onto for days, months, even years, because the pain was simply too great, and the wound never healed. It can be a difficult and painful process, but maybe that’s what time it is for you.