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Well ladies and gentlemen, I am so excited to say that this is my 100th blog post! Over the past 10 months I have had the amazing privilege of sharing my whirlwind of life-experiences with almost 130,000 people! Definitely bold letter worthy!  I have learned SO MUCH throughout this experience. So many questions finally have answers, and I have peace in my heart and a love for life that I never thought was possible. So what would I say is the greatest lesson I have learned so far?… I would have to say that it would be learning the value of mindfulness throughout any answer-quest, and that it’s ok to be ok with just the questions themselves. Just as enjoying the experience of steeping your favourite tea in a steaming cup of hot water, is equally as important as enjoying the first sip, enjoying the moments while we steep our lives in our journey is equally as important enjoying the arrival of our destination. All too often, days travel by, and years roll away, while not noticing that we have become unaware of the tastes, sounds, feelings, smells and sights of this lifetime. In short, ‘mindfulness’ is often not on our minds. Us human-beings become so end-result focused that we forget to take time to enjoy when the yummy, ‘syrupy bits’ of the unknown ‘stick to us’. God I love that line!..provided by a dear friend, and movie star 😉 You know who you are.

If there were two ‘teams’ in life, team answer and team question, before this year I would have definitely rallied to be captain of team ‘answer’. I use to thrive on having answers, and it served me well in a lot of ways. If you needed a medical answer, BAM!…I loved being able to teach it to anyone! A parenting answer, BAM!…I thought had enough parenting experience that I was confident I could dole-out an excellent piece of advice. Financial answer, life answer, love answer…I thought that I was well enough versed in all of these things that my answers were ‘Ann Landers advice column’ quality! Even though having answers is an important  part of life, looking back now I can see that I was very answer-egotistical! Sure I liked questions and encouraged my students to ask them…but I liked having the answers even better.

Fast forward to this past year when my mountain of what I thought were solid, life-sustaining answers came tumbling down like a landslide! Blindsided, I thrashed with them across the rocks of naiveté, breaking my bones as I slid down the ruins of my life uncontrollably! I tried so hard to grab on to branches of small answers which I thought for sure would stop me from falling, only to feel them snap under the weight of my one-sided ignorance. Then crash, I landed, beaten and defeated, wondering how my life-sustaining answers were wrong for so long.

Picking myself up from the wreckage of life-answer ignorance was humbling beyond words. Even though I knew that my answer-ego was formed out of the best of intentions, realizing that I missed out on so many important steps along the way of my ‘life-science-experiment’ was a difficult pill to swallow. How ironic that it literally took many pills in the form of an overdose for me to learn to stop jumping from hypothesis to conclusion with barely any qualitative and quantitative analysis in between. Sadly, like a child rushing through their kindergarden experiment, I was missing out on so many important details in which the sprouting of love, hope, and happiness could teach me by being solely focused on the bean in the wet paper towel and the stalk at the end of the experiment instead. I’m happy to say that I’ve finally learned that every millimetre of the sprouting in between has so much of a story to tell as well.

It’s so liberating when you manage to feel accomplished even when you don’t figure out every last detail. When you finally realize that: I don’t need to play God, I don’t need to take control of everything and everybody and I don’t need to solve everything. Being at peace with the “why”, is what allows us to be at peace with growth and is sometimes the best part of this experiment we call life.

Let the growing continue! ❤

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