In Life as a House George tells Sam they are going to work together to build a house on the ocean front property George’s father left him. After George’s death, Sam gives the house to the injured little girl (now grown), and we have a sense that all is right with the Monroe Family now. Over the credits we hear George’s voice:

“I always thought of myself as a house. I was always what I lived in. It didn’t need to be big. It didn’t even need to be beautiful. It just needed to be mine. I became what I was meant to be. I built myself a life. I built myself a house.”

Thinking of your life as a house? Are you a big house or little one? Are you fancy or plain? Our houses may all be stylistically different but inside they’re all basically the same. A few walls and a roof. It protects you. It keeps you warm in winter and dry in the rain. But underneath there’s the foundation, there’s the strength and you build on that.

Surely your house has marks on the walls and scratches on the floor. They all do. So you repaint the walls and buff the floor.  There are things in the basement, dark things, you never show company. Eventually you sort through those boxes, keep the stuff you need and throw out the rest. Everyday you decide how will you decorate your house, your life.

Today is my birthday and, strangely enough, I’m selling my house. My life is moving from one place to another. I’m taking what I’ve built and hoping it’s portable. I’m hoping the foundation is strong enough. I’m moving on, growing as a person and adding on to my life. As I look around my old house, then ahead to the next year, I wonder if my life as a house is moving in a good direction? Am I becoming what I’m meant to be? I hope so. I also hope I’m increasing my property value!

Linus: You know, you lose focus in this game for one second…
Danny: I know, somebody gets hurt.

This is a fact the permeates all our doings in every part of our life. I know this because I have lived; I was reminded of this because my mother lived through a car accident. She turned her head away from the road for a fraction of a second and the resulting crash left her banged and bruised and all of us wiser for the wear.

I reminds me of my first driving lesson.

Like every almost sixteen year old, I was eager to learn to drive; and like most parents, my dad was less than eager to teach me. However the day finally came one lovely Saturday afternoon, after much haranguing, my dad agreed to take me out on a drive. As you can imagine I practically flew out of the house with the keys in one hand and a song in my heart. I jumped in his then almost brand new 1987 Nissan Maxima and started the engine, put down all the windows and turned on the radio…loud. My dad came out of the house minutes later the find me dancing to “Holiday” in the driver’s seat. He opened the door, got in the passenger seat turned to me and in his best dad voice said, “Shut the radio, and shut the engine. Immediately.”

“Oh, great” I thought to myself, “this is going to be no fun at all.”

When silence returned to the car, my father turned to me and he said, “Listen to me very closely. This is an automobile. It is not a toy. And driving is not a game. This is an automobile and it weighs thousands of pounds. And the smallest error in judgment on your part, one second of fiddling with the radio and you can change your life and someone else’s forever. Every time you get into the car think long and hard about where your attention is, and where it needs to be.”

I grew up a lot that day, and have never gotten into the car since without flashing to that moment. It’s probably saved my life, and maybe some others, in many ways. Today I look around as I drive and I see distracted, overwhelmed people. People in a rush, drinking their coffee, patting their lap dogs and generally unaware of the thousands pounds of machine they are carelessly in control of.

Don’t be that person. Stop what you’re doing and just drive. Use your signals, stop rushing, move carefully fom here to there. Remember the life you save may be your own, or mine, or my mother’s.

The day they meet on the side of the highway Jane says something that stops Billy in his tracks. She says,

“I just have to get out of town, because the summer’s almost over and I missed it and I work all the time and it makes me feel old.”

Today I wrote “August 1″ and I realized the summer’s almost over and I’ve almost missed it. I haven’t had a summer adventure, yet. It reminds me of something my friend Coach Ginny wrote a few years and sends to all her clients every May. She says the time between Memorial Day and Labor Day flies by so before the summer gets here, sit down and pretend you’re in your fourth grade classroom and your teacher asked you to write, everyone’s favorite essay: “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” What do you want it to say?

Sound silly? It kinda is, but also very productive to write down and imagine yourself doing all the things you want to do. To be like a kid, and fill it with all the things you want to brag about having done this summer; then to realize you are a grown up, and have the power to really make it all come true! Print it out, post it to your refrigerator, and live by it all summer.

It may feel like the summer’s over but there’s still time. You have five weekends, 30 days and lots of sunshine. Make a list and spend some time having fun!

How are you going to spend your summer vacation?

“We need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet… I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things… all of it, all of the time, every day. You’re saying ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness’.”

This echoed in my head for days after I first heard it spoken. And it does now, years later, as I write this. To compare our lives to the metaphorical tree in the woods, if it falls and no one is around does it make a sound? If we live our lives without a witness have we lived at all?

It’s not clear to me if my life will be more remarkable than any other. However, I certainly don’t want it to go un-witnessed.

So I reach out to the world by any means I can, in search of a way to express my passions, fears, and revelations. I think we all do. In reaching out sometimes we are lucky, and we build a community of like-minded people to help us survive the feeling that the universe is big and in it we are small.

There’s an affirmation I like: You are seen • You are known • You are loved And it helps me.

What helps you feel less alone on this little rock hurling through space?

President Andrew Shepherd: Is the view pretty good from the cheap seats, A.J.?
A.J.: I beg your pardon?
President Andrew Shepherd: Because it occurs to me that in twenty five years I’ve never seen YOUR name on a ballot. Now why is that? Why are you always one step behind ME?
A.J.: Because if I wasn’t, you’d be the most popular history teacher at the University of Wisconsin!

The cheap seats aren’t really cheap. A.J.’s task was, most likely, back breaking, gut wrenching and thankless. But A.J. knew his efforts to move Andrew Shepard out of the History Department and into the White House would be the most significant use of his talents. A.J. was more than willing to take a cheap seat because he knew he could contribute more from there. For the love of the game.

In my life I have been fortunate enough to have friends willing to sit in the cheap seats of my life. They’re always there. They’re supportive and loving and helpful. They listen, they weigh the options, and they tell it like it is. You know what they don’t do? They don’t pander to me. Real friends won’t. Don’t make a collection of sidekicks. Check your circle for people who always say “you are so clever.” Make more time for those who say “I’ve seen you do better.” Pull up a chair and listen hard when they talk. Their words will be clues how to navigate yourself towards improvement.

A.J. is right when he says to President Shepard without me you would have never even dreamed of more. It’s the same for me. My friends saw potential in me that I would have never recognized on my own. They pointed out strengths and weaknesses and helped steer me to who I am today, and who I hope to be tomorrow.

“Some things are true whether you believe them or not.”

She says she can’t conceive of it. Much stronger words than liar, or no way. She can’t conceive of it.

There are so many things in this world I cannot conceive of: starving children, religious war, planes that fly around the globe against all evidence of gravity, but still they are real, they exist whether I can see them or not. There are wonderful things that exist too, things I can see so why not things I cannot?

Is this a post about God? Not necessarily. But it may be a post about faith. Having faith in a future you cannot see. Having faith in yourself, your abilities, how about faith that your instincts are correct? I believe these things whether I can see them or not.

What do you believe in that you cannot see?

Anne, the recently fired manager editor of a Vanity Fair-like magazine, is at a cross road in her life. She was a Manhattan super woman. She had it “all” money, power, prestige. Jobless she’s left wondering now what? She doesn’t know but she looks to Booker’s simple farm life with envy, and she wonders if she’d like being a rancher’s wife. They have long talks and Tom asks her if she knows what she wants. She says she doesn’t know. He says to her,

“knowing is the easy part; saying it out loud is the hard part”

What do we know? What is that doubt that plays in our heads but that we’re afraid to say out loud? Often long before we admit our relationship has gone sour, or our children aren’t getting enough attention or the refrigerator needs cleaning out we have a sneaking suspicion. A quiet nagging that we’ve left the reservation. We don’t know what to do next, so we silently suppress the information. I think I do it because if I say, out loud, what I feel in my heart then I’m going to have to rearrange my comfortable life to be true to what I know.

The inertia of an object in motion is so easy, wake up follow your routine go to bed repeat in the morning. It’s easy but authentic? Not so much. Derailing a freight train isn’t so easy, but sometimes it’s necessary to get back to the track you meant to choose. Ending the numbing pain of moving miserably down a path you never intended for yourself (or those you love).

Aside from your demise, there’s no real line of demarcation, no real “point of no return” but if saying it out loud is the hard part, why not, at least start there?

“So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

What to do with the time that is given to us. You don’t have to believe in a higher power to really digest that, every day you wake up and the choice is yours, what are you going to do with yourself? There is always, of course, the mundane: eat, sleep, drink, work, take care of those little people who mess up the house… but what’s after that? What shall we do with the time that’s given to us?

There’s an infinite number of answers, both selfish and selfless. They key to it though is hidden in the subtext, whatever we’re facing, and people around this planet face many TRUE hardships, instead of focusing on the wish that it never happened focusing on what to do now.

I’ve been in a bit of a self induced funk lately and this spins my head, from the bellyaching to the necessary next thing. There will always be a next thing.

So I leave you with the question what will you do with the time you have been given?

As Abby suffers the sadness and guilt of losing her husband she is consoled by many people. Abby recalls to Buddy, one such conversation with her mom. She said “Honey only the plane crashed, you gotta bounce.” Abby stops, she looks at Buddy and she says “Bouncing. It’s like crashing except you get to do it over and over again”

Just like Abby said, bouncing is doing the same thing over and over again and getting the same results, no step forward, no big fall. Just up and down, in place. Sometimes we have to fall before we succeed. It’s hard, but the big fall teaches you a new way. Falling is difficult, but necessary. Bouncing, however, is worse. It’s pointless, and frankly a good way to slowly torture yourself.

I’ve done a bit of bouncing over the years. These days I’d rather take a take a big risk and if necessary, a big fall. Bouncing has gotten me nowhere.

“Young lovers seek perfection. Old lovers learn the art of sewing shreds together and of seeing beauty in a multiplicity of patches.”

This week my parents will be celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary, and though I am so happy for them and the universe they created for our family, I can’t help but think: “How the hell did they do that?” It’s not really a mystery though, because for the most part I watched them do it. I watched them do, what I would call, compromise, day after day. A little bit here and a little bit there. It’s to the point now where I asked my mom what does she want on her pizza and she answers “get pepperoni, your dad likes pepperoni.”  Um what did she say?

They love each other, they have been together since they were 22 years old. They became who they are in the context of their marriage. And I must say, for the record, they are very happy. They overlook the wrinkles, the gray hair, and the bad habits. They enjoy their lives together.

Me, I’m dating, again. For the last 7 years, I’ve practiced, what my last boyfriend calls serial monogomy. I am not embarrassed to admit I’ve ended relationships for many reasons. Both large and small. Too this, too that, not enough of the other.  Am I young? No. Am I looking perfection? I am. Is this good? I don’t know, maybe I should be looking to piece together my own quilt of patches from here and experiences from there. But for now I’m not willing to compromise.