When you are chronically alive, you spend each minute of your life living in the present and enjoying the moment to the best of your ability.  The past is gone, you can’t go back and edit it.  While the future is unknown, you also have to hold in the back of your head that you don’t have years and years to live a meaningful life.  Everyone in the world wants to feel l like they have accomplished something that changed the world in some way, big or small.  To do that you need to set goals.

You can pick a reasonable list of five to ten little goals that you can achieve one at a time, some people call this their bucket list. I didn’t do this.  I chose one major goal.  “To use my writing to validate, inspire, and instill hope in others suffering from chronic physical and/or mental health conditions. I want to remind the world that mental illness doesn’t magically innoculate you against physical illness. I need to change the way people with invisible but serious health issues get treated by the medical community and even the general public.  My writing can be the catalyst for ending the stigma around chronic physical and mental illness.

Maybe I am crazy for hoping my website can do so much, but maybe not. To quote Steve Jobs, “People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

In every day, there are 1,440 minutes. That means we have 1,440 daily opportunities to make a positive impact

One of the ways to become Chronically Alive is through Mindfulness. You have to be able to “come home” to yourself and find a way to be comfortable in your mind and body.  “Coming Home” is a term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Noble Peace Prize winner and Buddhist Monk, who wrote volumes of books on mindful meditation, and ran mindfulness retreat centers all over the world.  His teachings have helped me to “come home”.

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us to get in touch with our breathing and nothing else.  We don’t allow thoughts of the past, present, or future into our heads.  We don’t let any thoughts at all into our heads while we are concentrating on our breathing.  It’s almost like we become our breathing. If we get distracted from focusing on a mantra of “breathing in” when we inhale, and “breathing out” when we exhale and feeling what those breaths feel like, we gently remind ourselves we lost our focus and bring ourselves back.  We only have to mindfully breathe for a couple of minutes to benefit from this mindfulness practice.

Once we have mastered focusing on our breath, we have a way to escape from the painful past and present and the scary future, by freeing ourselves into this safe zone and going “home” to our authentic selves underneath all the worried, obsessive thoughts, and physical and psychological pain.