“Everyone has inside of her a piece of good news.  The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be, how much you can love, what you can accomplish, and what your potential is,” Anne Frank.  So on this day, I saw an old card reading and in it, the reader said that the things we thought made us weird as children were what made us special/unique etc. and that we are meant to do those things that make us unique.  Weird is a subjective term.  I threw out the diaries I kept from the time I was 8 years old…between 8 and 17.  I thought I was being noble and brave putting aside all of that “childish” stuff—plus so much of it was repetitive garbage that it didn’t hold much weight.  I never thought the words of a child could hold that much weight.  But the author of our quote today only made it to 13 years old, and look at the impact the words of a 13 year old girl held for the entire world.  I threw out over a decade of my life, no matter how banal or trite, I threw out those years.  I erased who I was from the world because I hated that version of me.  I often wonder if I had let the magic of that girl out and embraced her earlier on, if I had accepted her and let her be who she was meant to be, how much sooner would she have found herself and become what she was meant to be.  I had no idea of what I could accomplish and I still don’t always believe it.  But I know that there is power in words.  There is weight in the words.

As we wind down this year and prepare for the next steps ahead, consider the words we use about our lives, about ourselves, how we define ourselves.  Consider what we want, who we want to be, how we want to feel, how we want to spend our time.  It’s easy to fall into the trap of repetitive living and call it….living.  This life, no matter how trying or long will always prove terribly short for the things we want to do.  So don’t waste time doing anything other than what we want to do.  Even the tasks that we don’t want to do, make them things that serve the greater purpose.  Be who we are.  Allow that greatness to come out before we forget.  We are born with this inherent knowing of the power of the universe and the same power that resides in us.  We are trained to let it go, to sacrifice it for the sake of some ill-perceived obligation to those around us.  I whole-heartedly believe that we are meant to put aside all of the training we receive and remember how we feel.  Become incredibly close with our own knowing and beliefs and remember the insane possibility of who we are and do whatever it takes to make that possibility a reality.  There are people who have all the potential in the world and never get the opportunity to use it, there are people who serve so much purpose in their time here and we wonder what they would have done with more time—we never know what we have.  Don’t waste it.

It’s not a discovery of greatness, it’s a remembrance. Don’t let outside interference confuse us.  The more we remember who we are, the less we can pretend we are NOT that.  The sooner we understand that we are meant to heed our inner knowing and what feels right the sooner we can shed what doesn’t work for us.  The truth is that if we follow the patterns of those before us, and we see they aren’t where we want to be (or that they never ended up where they wanted to be), then we are meant to break the cycle.  We can’t get lost in the tradition of something for the sake of repeating a pattern.  Had I known who I was, who I was meant to be, I wouldn’t have dismissed my younger years.  I don’t claim to have had any sort of profundity at that time, but if I had believed in the possibility of what I would say, learn, and grow to become, perhaps I would have seen something else in me sooner.  I would have spent less time worrying about the approval of anyone else and simply been me.  Our lives matter, what we say, think, feel, and do with our time matters.  It doesn’t matter how much time we have, we just need to spend it well.  Remember who we are, because we all have value and enormous potential—it’s up to us to unleash it.