Watching the inauguration yesterday brought me to tears! Seeped in words like unity, peace, healing, and hope...the positivity was palpable. It is exactly what we all need in these challenging times.

I believe it was one of the most powerful and moving inaugural ceremonies I have witnessed.

Other than the fact that J.Lo is 50 and gave me hope for how rockin' one can look with age, what stood out for me the most was the voice and words of the 22-year-old Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman. Just. Wow.

I watched with my twin teenage girls and my 10-year-old son Jack (who are home this week in remote school) and they were as frozen by her poetic passion as I was, lost in words that signaled a collective purpose. Like all good poetry, they were words that held the hearts of so many who feel they are spinning just too quickly from this deadly pandemic and the groundlessness of these times.

Amanda’s words, quoting my all-time favorite show Hamilton, “for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us”...can this be a reminder of what I described during my webinar last night about what we might remember if we could meet our older selves?

What if you used that same lens in your own life so you could be reminded that your calm, loving, older self has its eyes on your choices RIGHT NOW.

What is it you long to do? What isn’t serving you that you can let go of? Did you pause and soak up the preciousness of life? Did you play enough and choose joy?

When you imagine your future self-looking back on your life, it can add perspective, and you see more clearly that you have a choice. Remember my quote from the webinar last night: “Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing.”

How can we stay stuck knowing that?

Amanda's poem, "The Hill We Climb,” is an ideal metaphor for the resilience we cultivate when we move through change. Sometimes a hill, other times a mountain, but climb you can. And you will.