Love at first hug. Deidre Rosenboom and me at The Wine Bar in Arnold’s Park, Iowa.

Saturday, I had the opportunity to give a talk to 30 women in Spirit Lake Iowa. These are some of the ideas I shared. I saw several women wake up to these truths. It was beautiful for me and I count it as one of the most important things I have ever done.

Forty-two days watching seven people fight for their lives in a Neurological Intensive Care Unit deconstructed everything I thought I knew about life and gifted me with the following life-altering lessons. Make them yours:

• –Life is not a dress rehearsal. Every moment that passes is gone and you only have so many. Death isn’t going to wait for you to be finished or ready to go. We all die in medius res–in the midst of things.

• – It’s not the destinations in life that define it, it’s the journeys. Life is a collection of connected moments and the quality of each moment is what sets its predominant tone. The destinations are experienced in a single moment and as soon as you reach one, you’ll set out for another. Making goals the most important things in your life results in very few satisfying moments and countless missed opportunities to really live.

• –There is only one human relationship that is guaranteed to last a lifetime: the one between you and you. The approval that matters is yours. This is the relationship to work on first and most often.

• –”THEY” don’t exist the way you think they do. They are mutated figments of your imagination. You create the “What-will-they-thinks” by taking one or more people from your life or the world, placing them on a pedestal, running a scenario about you by them, and then putting negative words in their mouths. The truth is you don’t know what people are thinking. The bigger truth is that it doesn’t matter what they’re thinking. The time others spend fussing over and criticizing you is time taken away from investing in the life that always needs attention: their own.

• –NOW is the only guaranteed opportunity for happiness. I had, up until that point, lived in anticipation of a future that I’d be happy in. It was an idyllic someday when my husband and I would have all of money, time, and freedom we wanted, the kids would be set, our businesses would be easy to run and we’d be free. THEN we would be happy. Watching people die taught me that someday may never come. It has to be right now. Someday is always here.

This is the work that gives my life its greatest meaning because it allows me to take pain, suffering, and loss and use it for good. Please share this post with everyone you love.