Are You Feeling Brave Enough? #Covid19

 

While in #SafeAtHome quarantine for COVID-19, I have been reading nearly every day and wrote about 8 books that can transport you for Ms. Magazine. Cheryl Strayed’s WILD: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was in my article, and when I wrote to her team to share it, I learned about her book, Brave Enough. I wanted to share some quotes from this book that inspired me. Learn more about Cheryl Strayed, her books and all of her projects on her website, CherylStrayed.com.

Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

You can’t ride to the fair unless you get on the pony.

Transformation doesn’t ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that’s already inside of you. You only have to bloom.

Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.

What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the committee made up. You get to make your life.

When the path reveals itself, follow it.

Trust that all you’ve learned was worth learning, no matter what answer you have or do not have about what practical use it has in your life. Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into the crazy beauty that awaits.

Accept that their actions hurt you deeply. Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it’s going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

It isn’t too late. Time is not running out. Your life is here and now. And the moment has arrived at which you’re finally ready to change.

If it is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

This is not how your story ends. It’s simply where it takes a turn you didn’t expect.

We all get stuck in place on occasion. We all move backward sometimes. Every day we must make the decision to move in the direction of our intentions. Forward is the direction of real life.

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.

Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?

All flower photos by Lisa Niver with #LGV60ThinQ
during COVID-19 walks around the block.

Lisa Ellen Niver

Lisa Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries on six continents. This University of Pennsylvania graduate sailed across the seas for seven years with Princess Cruises, Royal Caribbean, and Renaissance Cruises and spent three years backpacking across Asia. Discover her articles in publications from AARP: The Magazine and AAA Explorer to WIRED and Wharton Magazine, as well as her site WeSaidGoTravel. On her award nominated global podcast, Make Your Own Map, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors, and as a journalist has been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and been a finalist twenty-two times. Named a #3 travel influencer for 2023, Niver talks travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, her YouTube channel with over 2 million views, and in her memoir, Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty.

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