What Matters Most (to you)?

The tragedies of our lives

Provide us with the opportunity to remember:

What matters most?

What do we value?

What do we want our life to say?

What needs to go and what needs to stay?

What changes will bring more joy to life?

Last night, I met a couple of new friends who shared that it was the 3 year anniversary date of the flood that devastated Nashville.  The winds were gusting yesterday and the forecast was calling for storms which made those who lived through the flood fear a repeat.  They shared that the gift of the flood was remembering what matters most.

They recalled helping neighbors who had priceless guitars drifting and submerged under the waters but all they desperately wanted to salvage were their treasured family photos.  But they admitted how difficult it is to keep what matters most? in perspective day in and day out, getting swept away by things that truly don’t matter. 

We spoke about what an exercise in powerlessness the experience of being in a flood or natural disaster or the death of a loved one whose time has come to leave this earth.  And the beauty of knowing we as human are powerless over certain circumstances can motivate us to live more freely and make choices each day that feed our life with joy and love. 

Holding the inquiry What matters most (to me)? will bring front and center in any given moment what actually matters.  It won’t be some idea or ideal we have imprinted in our minds of what we say we value or think our life says or living in the shoulds regarding changes in our lives.  It will bring the truth, our personal truth forward shining the light on what we know in the depths of our Self matters most. 

We owe this truth to our Self and only our Self.  When we are clear that we matter, what we believe, what we want, what we value, and what our life says about who we truly are, we live this life with a passion that ignites those around us.  We are souls on fire!  Our freedom gives them permission to come out and play and enjoy this gift of life. 

We don’t have to wait for tragedy to begin the inquiry:  What matters Most?  This isn’t something that we answer once, it is an question we sit with throughout our lifetime allowing it to simmer, to bubble up wisdom and truth that enlivens us.