This morning I broke my usual morning routine of getting up, practising a bit of German, before writing my morning pages, and possibly exercising. Instead, I decided to clean the apartment.

The weekends have been a real down time event for me lately, choosing to do nothing short of taking a shower and ordering food. But what I do in-between these activities I have left to whatever my immediate soul cravings and yearnings might be. Some weekends I get lost in a marathon of my favourite television shows, which for the last two weekends in a row has been both, ‘The Good wife‘ and its spinoff, ‘The Good Fight.‘

This past weekend, I did very little tiding up, and instead managed to switch between reading Laurence J Peter and Raymond Hull’s ‘The Peter principle‘, with intermittent studying ‘Agile Development‘ on Coursera. Between those activities, I also jotted down a few ideas that came to me as I let my mind wander, and quite naturally, allowed music to soothe my searching soul wherever there were gaps.

This resulted in a Monday morning filled with dishes in my sink, dry laundry that needed folding, and a house that screamed, ‘Vacuum and Mop me please before we take on this week!’

Now that the scene has been set, instead of my usual routine, like I said, I decided to clean. As I cleaned, I put on my headphones and continued listening to Michelle Obama’s autobiography, ‘Becoming‘. I was on the chapter where she was recounting the events leading up to their second term in office, and the murder of Hadiya Pendleton. I write this not with the intention of rewriting the former first lady’s story, but only about the triggers experienced listening to how she described Hadiya.

In a nutshell, she described Hadiya, as being a fifteen year old African American young lady with a head full of dreams and after having visited Washington, hoped to some day possibly get into politics too. She described a young woman’s potential that will never be realised. It is a sad story, but none the less a story that must be told. My angle is not that of the racial injustices that are rampant in the world at large, or gun violence described in further detail within this chapter by the author, and with great cause indeed, but mine is that of the length of life.

When I started working after graduating from college in 2012, I remember a conversation that I had with my father. I had been assigned to Dubai in the Middle East along with a secondment to Nairobi, Kenya, which meant on returning from this assignment in Dubai, I would not be returning to my home country, but rather would journey on to Kenya as an initial home base. I had been so excited about this opportunity, and in my mind’s eye where all my fanciful worlds came alive, I had thought it a great idea to share with my father my need to write. My need to write about all that I had experienced, and would experience on this journey.

“I want to write a book dad!”, I had said emphatically.

“Not yet. You have not lived enough yet”, he calmly, but with a serious tone responded to my declaration.

I vaguely remember the rest of the conversation, because I was now processing the hurt and blow that my little author inside me had just received. I listened, and I took these words to heart, and true to those same words, I haven’t still written a book, any book…because I still did not feel that I had lived enough…

Fast forward to 2020.

I am living and working in Europe, and focusing on staying sane amidst a global pandemic that has shaken up life as we know it. The terror of the whole period can be seen in the mixed media messages, the dividing lines forming around how far civil liberties can be contested amidst a threat that seems debatable to the world at large of its severity, and the halt it has brought to what anyone could have claimed to be ‘routine’. In the past eight months, the world at large has been forced into a pause, a time for forced reflection that it would otherwise not have had.

I have been forced into a pause.

Working from home for the first half of those eight months, I have questioned a lot, from agile working practices and why we did not implement them fully sooner, to the meaning of life and finding one’s purpose and how crucial that entire pursuit seems to be above all else. I have processed the deaths of loved ones, not necessarily from the pandemic itself, but how a life ending during such a time as this raises similar questions concerning what living means, but with a greater sense of urgency…

What will my life amount to when it is all done?

What matters most to me if all this should end now?

What have I always wanted to do but haven’t done, and am at risk of never doing if I don’t start now ?

The last question is quite a pertinent question in my mind lately. Because the answer is very simple, regardless of who has asked me over the years , the answer has always been a constant…

I will regret not writing.

It doesn’t matter what I write, the genre, the audience or all the other questions that usually start with, ‘What exactly do you want to write about‘; this is not the focal point. All I know is that when I tell stories, real or imagined, it is then that I feel most at home, and I feel most connected to my purpose of being. Before I can talk about my father’s words coming to mind, I had an idea pop up once again, whilst still listening to Michelle Obama’s autobiography.

Why not write a memoir?

The idea came up when listening to how Barak Obama had written his first memoir earlier on in his career as a means of reconciling with himself his life up to that point; the emphasis being on the role his absent father played in his life then… ‘Dreams from my Father‘.

I thought to myself, what a incredible idea!

I had been toying with the concept of telling MY own story, more for myself than to have anyone to read it; because no one ever starts telling their stories with the belief that there is something uniquely special about their story, but rather from a place of looking for internal clarity of one’s own being.

Reading about how his book was first conceived, it became clear for me what I was trying to write and why.

My very own memoir…

A reconciliation of how far I had come to be where I am today,

A means of clarifying for myself my own thoughts and beliefs about myself and life thus far;

What I had taken out of crucible moments that challenged my sense of self despite the emotions, but also equally acknowledging the emotions,

And hopefully in the midst of all that clarifying, charter a new course forward.

It made perfect sense to me. The former 44th United States President’s first autobiography was published when he was just 34 years. I am now 33 years old. Why not me too?

Feeling excited about pursing this even more seriously now, I had shared my thoughts with someone I considered a dear friend, and believed they would understand me, and immediately get it, since they knew me well enough to know what writing meant to me.

“What? You want to write a memoir, but you haven’t even lived yet?”, he answered almost incredulously.

This time however I didn’t take the blow, instead I pushed back.

“What do you mean I haven’t lived yet? Seriously?

All those experiences and events that have happened in my life for as far back as I can recall, my experiences in high school and college that shaped the life that I then opened myself up to;

My corporate career so far that has plenty-a-tales to tell, and what of the people that I have met along the way, and the significant impact they have had on me, and I possibly on them?

Is that not a life lived?

The realisation of some of the latent potential that my grade school teachers saw, long before my college professors further harnessed it into the steam and energy being put to use in the employment that I am now in?

How is that not a life?

We keep waiting for a far off place and time, that we think by the time we reach it , we would have earned ourselves the right to claim to have now ‘lived enough’ to talk about it; yet every day that is not promised but is still gifted to us is in of itself a day lived enough.”

THIS HERE NOW IS LIFE.

Hadiya comes back to mind. Can we say she hadn’t lived long enough? Sure we can! Because there was more that she could have done, more life she could have experienced had she gone on living. But that is exactly life’s paradox. We do not have a say unless we commit suicide, of knowing when it all ends. No one can determine the ‘length of life‘ for us to be given any authority to state what having ‘lived enough‘ is, to allow us to now start talking about us, sharing with others our stories, let alone writing about them.

On listening to my little rampage, my friend agreed that what I had just said made a lot of sense. And then a trailing thought lingered in the back of my mind;

‘This is how we miss out on living – Crippling words with no basis in bad faith but rather spoken unconsciously, that we hold onto without realising how they, in fact, are the ones holding us. Not from anything hurtful , but back from all that we could be if we hadn’t heard them at all in the first place”

This is what makes the difference between people who live truly inspired lives, and those who at the ripe age of ‘whatever‘ years old, talk in undisguised regretful and bitter tones, about what they could have done had someone told them they could, right back there and back then. Always waiting for some ‘time in the future‘ that we are never guaranteed to have but can only HOPE to have.

As I start this week, I choose to not to tarry concerning what I would like to do, to have and to be.

I choose this moment, because there truly is no better time than the present for anything.

Because who really knows when it will be, that we will get to the cliff’s edge?

It could be today, or a few more generations from now, but that journey’s stretch till then, is precious time that should not be wasted and unaccounted for.

Time now, is time enough.

Any day, any moment, could be THAT moment that defines the length of your life.

Sophie, make this moment now, count…