Your Best Life Is Calling. Here's How To Answer.
Are you trying? I mean really trying.
Or are your dreams in a dusty box, in the dark, under your bed? Your unsung songs. Your unstamped passport pages. Your unsent love letters. Your illusion of having something to lose.
When you ask for the hotel’s wake up call, it’s the front desk clerk calling at 6am asking you what you’re doing with your life.
And it’s realizing how little anyone else cares.
What are you waiting for? Every minute of delay is a minute beyond your “later” date wasted. Light your excuse list on fire. That “one day” is today. Get started. Do it now.
Those 90 year-olds that just took up skydiving, they’ve finally seen the light. They’ve realized life goes by in a blink, that it’s never too late. Before the final grains of sand slip through the hourglass, they’re squeezing their grape like a vintner making fine wine.
Much younger, my good friend Kaitlin just took a big jump. Into the ring of entrepreneurship, she’s jumped ship on corporate life. She overflows with hope, energy and acts of exceedingly good intentions. Her positivity is contagious, she’s magnetic and alive in the truest sense. So I’m not too worried about her future success. She’s the type that even if thrown to the wolves, she’ll return leading the pack.
Choosing to thrive in the jungle instead of survive in the zoo wrings the most out of life. Surviving is not living, you were built to thrive. Finding out what you’re capable of pays dividends far beyond money. Selecting this path prevents an overstuffed regrets box.
Change is painful, growth is permanent. It’s the painful part scaring the majority huddling in fear. Comfort brings settling. Settling closes doors to what could be. If you want to know how big and beautiful your flower garden can get, embracing life’s storms is the only way. Recognize it’s the rain in life’s storms growing the flowers not the thunder.
Here’s some epic wisdom from Seneca, “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”
Contemplating this turns your ignition key, alighting the engine of your imagined life. Kaitlin’s doing it, so should you.
A reflection.
The Real-Life Wake-Up Call of Grandma Moses.
Proof that your “one day” can start today — even if it’s decades overdue.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known to the world as Grandma Moses, didn’t pick up a paintbrush until she was 78 years old.
Born on September 7, 1860 in Greenwich, New York, Anna spent her entire life doing what rural women in the 19th century did: farming, raising kids, churning butter, and stitching embroidery. Her life was full, but not particularly unusual. Her art? It had been packed away in the form of needlework, done mostly to pass time during long winters.
But when arthritis eventually made her embroidery too painful, she didn’t pack it in. She pivoted. She picked up a paintbrush. At 78.
With house paint and cardboard.
No formal training. No artistic pedigree. Just a dusty dream and a heart still alive with wonder.
She painted what she knew: pastoral scenes, farm life, snowy hills, county fairs. And she did it with joy, conviction, and no expectation that it would lead anywhere. But the act of trying — really trying — started a chain reaction.
In 1938, a local collector named Louis J. Caldor spotted her paintings displayed in a drugstore window in Hoosick Falls, New York. He bought them all and brought them to a New York art dealer. Her first solo exhibition, “What a Farm Wife Painted,” opened in 1940 at Galerie Saint Etienne in Manhattan. She was 80.
She went on to paint over 1,500 pieces, became a cultural icon, and her art now hangs in museums all over the world — from the Smithsonian to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the height of her fame, she appeared on The Today Show, had a stamp issued in her honor, and was named “Woman of the Year” by Mademoiselle magazine.
She died in 1961, at 101 years old, having lived more than two full lives — and having awakened her second act at an age most people stop dreaming.
Grandma Moses didn’t just delay her dreams. She stored them in a dusty drawer for decades. Then one day, she said yes. And it changed everything.
Your life asks: What are you waiting for?
Her life answers: Nothing. Wait for nothing.
Her hands had arthritis, her peers had stopped working, and the world had moved on — but she picked up the brush anyway.
Because the greatest tragedy isn’t failure — it’s never trying.
You’re becoming something, why not make yourself more persuasive?
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