Take Back Your Life!

Quote of the day: “We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” ~ Marcel Proust

Hello all!

I’ve been a Marcel Proust fan for years after reading a book about the writer called, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton. For those of you who are not familiar with the quirky, yet wise and sympathetic french author who died in 1922, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust wrote the epic: In Search of Lost Time, also know as À la recherche du temps perdu. Years ago, I got out the heavy 7 volume tome and tried to read the 3,200 pages, but could not get past the first 200. Exhausting! It’s the kind of book you almost need to take as a class in order to make yourself stay with it. However, I wanted to “read” it so I cheated and watched the movie. He spends a lot of  his life ill in bed reflecting back on his life – much of it as a child at the beach – and the lessons he has learned.  (more…)

On Christmas Eve, I picked up the phone and called five friends, three were home, two were out. I hadn’t spoken to some of them in years. I’d been meaning to call. Yet, the days turned into months, the months into years. One was a best friend from grade school. We reminded each other of a tree we climbed in her backyard, a birch onto which we carved our initials and the initials of boys we liked. I wonder if that tree and the four sets of initials still exist? Thinking about the sets of initials reminded me of my favorite line from one of my favorite movies: The Summer of ’42, “Life is made up of small comings and goings, and for everything we take with us, there is something we leave behind.” We move forward in life, but little bits of us stay behind for others to find. If you haven’t seen that 1971 coming of age movie, I highly recommend it. It’s beautiful and tragic and uplifting and breathtaking. And has no special effects, unless you count the magical things we forget that nature can do.  (more…)