Right Now...Matters.

Do you ever look back at your life and break out in the sweats? You look back at choices you’ve made with your kids, and know you’ve F’d up somewhere? How many times have you woke up at 3am and evaluated your life; letting it replay over and over in your mind like a really bad song you can’t get out of your head?

For some reason, I have this cycle in my life where every couple of weeks I wake up at 3am in a total panic and I keep running over and over in my head scenarios of where I’ve totally screwed up as a parent; thoughts of “If I only” or “Why didn’t I?” Then, I start to worry about the future. Oh, man, don’t get me started about the future.

See, we all believe that we want to do a better job than our parents, and yet, in the back of our minds we keep questioning our outcomes. Should I have done it differently? I should have done this or I should have done that. We should ourselves right out of living in the moment. We keep looking back at what we did, and stress out on something we have no power to change.

Let’s face it, right here and right now…We will never be able to change the past. So why do we try? The only thing we have any control over is this exact moment right now. We keep basing our future on what we experienced in the past, and you know what? It never works because life is subjective. Nobody looks at any given situation the same way. I don’t care what anyone says, we could have a room full of people and something occurs—nobody will tell the same exact story. That’s because we all have our own history stamped and embedded in our minds. It’s the past experiences we cling to so we can draw some form of conclusion for our current state of affairs. We feel the only way to validate our current situation is by comparing it to what has already happened. The problem with that is then we are letting our past dictate our future.

There is absolutely nothing we can do to change the past, so it’s time to stop living in it. What if I said, who cares what we did yesterday, today is a new day? Because guess what? Today, right now, is the first moment of the rest of our lives…What we do right now, is the only thing that truly matters. The past is over, the future isn’t here; it is right now, the present, which we need to see as our gift.

We must stop beating ourselves up for choices we made with our old consciousness and start cheering for the choices we are making with our new consciousness! Right now, we have the choice to live from this moment forward, or keep, hitting the ball and dragging George. It doesn’t do us any good to drag along our past mistakes or doubts. It won’t create the future we want. We want a better future? We must start with living in the NOW, today. Learn from our past but stop inviting it to come along for the ride. Stop letting what we did years ago define who we are today. We are completely different people now.

Thoughts we think today, create the patterns of tomorrow. Think about it, what we focus on today creates our tomorrow. So what are we focusing on; more dread, anger, frustration, and our mistakes? Do we really want that to be who we are and what we bring to the table of our future? Take today each moment at a time. Feel what it’s like to breathe in the only breath of Right Now. Feel what it’s like to be completely present, in the moment. It is the most empowering thing we can do.

Here we go, today, take a moment to talk to someone you’ve never met. Smile at a stranger, hug your children a couple seconds longer, take a moment to stop and really listen to what your loved ones are saying. Be proud of who you are, and what you’ve become. Take this moment, right now, to live the life you’ve dreamed of having. Dare to make right now, the most important moment of your life.

Thanks for hanging out and reading my ramblings.

Picture taken when my son hiked the back country of Yosemite-Aug. 2012

How much back story is enough?

I have asked myself so many times, what was Lauren's favorite color? How was Wilson's relationship with her grandparents? What year did Alejandro leave Spain? Questions that I might have answered in the books I have written, but did not take the time to write down in a character's bio page. Yeah, that's what I call them, character bio pages. I have to admit, I haven't done them for all the characters in each of my books, but I did one for Lauren and one for Wilson.

Now the question is when do I throw my hand in the air and say T.M.I.? What is too much information? The color of her socks as she leaves her house for the last time or what she ate for breakfast seems to me, a little over the top. However; if that information is essential in the plot development or moving the intentions of the character forward, than I would have written them down. But in my stories they don't.

I would be lying if I said it wasn't one of the best parts of creating a character. Think about it. I could make this person into anything I want. Good or bad, atheist or Christian, carnivore or vegetarian, anything, it is my choice. Yeah, it feels pretty powerful, like I'm holding the existence of people in my hands, but it also creates a sense of responsibility too. It's up to me to convince and convey that their world truly does exists and that she or he belongs in it.

So when one of my BFFs (who so generously read everything I have written) asked me why my character did what she did, I couldn't answer with, "I don't know."

Never was there a day where I could have gotten away with- just because. What made Wilson, at seventeen years old, have the maturity to handle not only the physical responsibility of a relationship with a man five years older than her, but the ability to rationalize theories in her mind of different events and scenarios that shaped her life. In other words, what events occurred in her life that made her who she was for those three days in Aspen? How old was she when her mother left? What month did her grandpa die? What was her favorite color, music, food, and where did she live before boarding school? The story of her life, I should know it like the back of my hand (Hey, where did that freckle come from?).

I guess the answer to my question of how much back story is enough, must be-- until I feel I know the character like I know myself. Every life shaping event, every painful mistake, every tear jerking moment, and every joyous triumph they have ever had in their life. It's that which brings them to where they live in the tens of thousands of words that I write as I create their world.