Biggest Lessons: Part 1

This past November, I had a love affair with Oprah’s Lifeclass. I had never really been very interested in Oprah, so a lot of the footage was new to me. I thought that her series was so wonderfully put together and gracefully summed up Oprah’s biggest life lessons. If you haven’t watched the series, you must because it is so powerful.

In light of my new interest, I started to find myself curious of other people’s life lessons. I decided to ask each of my parents what their biggest life lessons were. My mother was the first to respond, although her response may not be considered a lesson.  I told her that, “the lesson is a challenge and the challenge is a lesson.” Here is what she wrote:

Biggest challenge: Mom

My biggest challenge is to live through my heart and not my head. One might think this is easy, but it is really tricky – (tricky trick as my mother would say).  It may just be the trickiest trick of all. Living with my heart guiding me means disregarding things that the mind throws in front of me, things that often seem so reasonable but feel off. That is the key I think, to knowing when you are in your head and not your heart- how you feel.

People don’t necessarily like it when you’re operating from your heart because your actions or responses often don’t make sense in a logical way – so they see you as not thinking straight. This is exactly what happens. The brain sees things in a straight line – if that, so this. The heart however “considers” and somehow comes down on the side of love, however messy and unclear that seems. I want to live here. This is my biggest and most consistent challenge.

Stay tuned for part 2 and 3.