The Choice: Embrace the Possible

in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are—human, imperfect, and whole.

overnight. And you’re never going to be glad that he’s dead. But you get to choose a way forward. You get to discover that living a full life is the best way to honor him.” Last year I received a Christmas card

‘We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.’ ”

But you can choose how you live now. My precious, you can choose to be free.

painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.

Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.

used to ask, Why me? Why did I survive? I have learned to ask a different question: Why not me? Standing on a stage surrounded by the next generation of freedom fighters, I could see in my conscious awareness something that is often elusive, often invisible: that to run away from the past or to fight against our present pain is to imprison ourselve

These are lost children looking for an identity, looking for a way to feel strength, to feel like they matter.

Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.