Oprah is not my business.

Not for a moment.

Recently, when I re-committed to writing, I began to fill my 2-year-old wallet-sized and mostly dormant notebook with ideas and first lines.

While walking on Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, a question came up.

“What time are you wasting, salivating over someone else’s food?”

I wrote “food”, but I meant “success” – or at least what appears as external success.

Living in our culture, others’ stories are seductive.

I grew up watching and adoring Oprah, who taught me things my mother never could.

To say she reversed and amplified her life wouldn’t do her justice.

Given her childhood, it could be easy for me to wonder, “Why didn’t I do better than where I am today?”

Oprah and I are the same age and I am no Oprah.

What happened?

Exactly what happened is what happened.

You and I are not anyone else but ourselves.

As younger people, we thought we needed to emulate the culture.

Now as adults, we have freer minds.

Minds that can choose.

Oprah is not my business.

I am.

And it leads to the question that’s in my heart, for all of us:

“How can I claim and love the beauty and specialness of my own life, rather than the marketed, famous life?”

Having said YES to writing, only now am I looking with new spirit at many unattended nooks in the rooms of my life to see what’s there and what wants to emerge.

I have no idea what’s here and what’s coming.

But I do know that if I show up and keep looking and writing, allowing myself to discover ME, I have a chance to find out what’s here and to fulfil the life that I got.

Many of us who want the experience of creative luscious aging feel the clock ticking.

And that’s okay too.

It’s okay to feel urgent.

It’s okay to know that we won’t live forever.

It’s okay to keep creating and discovering what’s possible.

That sounds like something I could salivate over.

My dream is that you look inward and create too.

And yet, I’ll keep dreaming my dreams, and if you want to dream too, the easiest thing to do is to listen for what’s whispering to you from the inside.

Take notes.

They matter.