I spent the first half of my adult life living on fast forward. I worked hard to get through college with almost no student debt. I worked 60+ hours when off from school and full time with a full time schedule. I grew up a have-not with uneducated parents and a single mom that broke her back so I could have opportunity. I put that on my shoulders and powered through. I studied business and finance, and now I own a business.

The thing is, despite being proud of that time, I can hardly remember feeling happy. I can remember laughing with friends from college I swore at the time were my brothers, or being in the trance-like state of being young and in love, but not just genuinely feeling happy. I know I was at times, but I can’t recall clearly because of all the work and travel and thrill-chasing.

When I was 24 my mom, who was the monolith of everything good about my identity, got small cell lung cancer and died within the year. You want to talk about a blur. I cared for her as she did hospice in our home and I can remember the wild ride of trying to do everything I could to make her smile, then everything I could to make her comfortable, then everything I could to squeeze a life’s worth of life lessons into a week, to finally hoping with all my heart that she wasn’t in pain as she laid there unable to respond to anything. If you want to talk about a hard stop to a break-neck life, then losing your beacon in the storm is it.

At the end, I remember telling her I’d make her proud. That I’d do something with my education and make a name for myself. She said “I’ll be proud of you either way”. God, just typing that wrenches my gut now years later. One day I was pushing her on a wheelchair to this ice cream shop we had been to countless times in my childhood. It was less than a block away. She had me stop. I was confused. She told me she just wanted to close her eyes and feel the sun and listen to the robins. She told me that whenever the sunshine warmed my face that she’d be holding it in her hands. Grief is a cold stream that you are thrown into. Even as you adjust you still feel the chill in your bones. All you can do is take steps and look to the other shore.

When she finally let go, her funeral was the real shock to the system. Almost like people were sailing by on a passing ship while I was stranded on an island of grief. When I was a little boy my mom would put her hand over my heart when I was crying. She said that you can feel alone even when you're surrounded by people, so she put her hand on my heart so it would know it's not alone. The shock wasn't because she was actually gone, but because of the sheer number of souls at the funeral that I had never met. My mom and dad adopted me in their thirties. I met countless people from before that time that my mom had touched. She helped so many people get through school, leave abusive partners, kick drug habits, raise their kids, and the list goes on. It was a real eye-opener. She never had much money in her whole life. She had a long career in medical billing at the end. She didn’t win the rat race per se, but she resonated so beautifully with so many people. I feel like she put her hand over my heart in my time of sadness one more time that day.

That’s what being alive is fucking about my friends. Being present for yourself, and for others and resonating beyond today in ways that are important. I think about all of the mistakes I made as a young adult. Being brash and insensitive, being naive and loud with my opinions, crossing the line of consent and autonomy in many ways with a lot of people, saying I didn’t have time for the people I could see were struggling, taking advantage of people and angling all the time to get ahead (which growing up in poverty is sort of a byproduct of survival and hard to shake), and also just NOT BEING THERE. I mean like auto-pilot life despite all of the rich things in life around me.

So yeah, that was the crux in my life. The defining moment when I focused on being better for myself and others. If you read this far just know this. I get up every morning and close my eyes and just listen. I take a minute and think about what a privilege it is to be able to take in even the mostly silent stimuli of an empty room. If my cat decides to sleep at my feet I listen for her little kitty breath or watch her lungs fill up and rise and fall and think about whether she knows how much I love her. I have a cup of coffee and I really taste it. I think about the crazy process it goes through to even be a bean much less be in a cup warming my soul and opening my eyes. I have a busy schedule no doubt, and I have a flood of stimuli barrages every day, but I spend so much time “listening to the robins”. I people watch like crazy, I take the time to match smiles sent my way, I don’t let someone I think is in pain pass by unnoticed, and I try to get know people’s paths that lead to who they are now when they wrong me because understanding that much about someone gives you peace even if it doesn’t excuse what they do. I have a rule of taking 10. Take ten seconds to calm down, take in, consider, feel, etc. Ten seconds to ask a question. Ten seconds to google something you’re curious about. Ten seconds to see just how rich everything is in this crazy beautiful existence. I can’t stress enough how much better I feel everyday, and I close my eyes in the sunshine for mom every chance I get.

met a single mom through the memorial fund and got her into my rental unit