So you’re ringing in the new year and you find yourself refreshing your Instagram for all of the ironic, “New Year, New Me!” posts. (A phrase that is used and abused so much that it's become a running joke that lasts until the end of January).
In 2016, I implore you to mean it. Let 2016 be the year that you say, “enough” to the mundane in your life and begin to start living. Don’t confuse this as some spiel to get you to really commit to that gym membership you purchased, but rather, something else.
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This year, I dare you to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is a scary word, I know. You may even look at it and cringe. Because we live in a society that is so quick to judge, we're all understandably hesitant toward this concept. Vulnerability means being exposed, getting you to the purest form of self-truth. Rawness is being stripped down, layer after layer, tearing down the walls until you reach a center you didn’t even know was there.
Two weeks ago, I was given the opportunity to float in a hot air balloon, and as we drifted into the air, I didn’t feel it. I didn’t get the magical sensation that everyone else was talking about on the way up. The feeling I got was when we crash landed into unknown territory, my heart was beating fast and I felt it.
Alive.
The moment I had my first spiritual experience was not in a church, during meditating, or the depths of nature. Mine was at the Lana Del Rey concert in Chicago in 2013. The energy, the love, the feeling of community of all these seemingly broken people coming together to belt out “Born to Die” with tears streaming down our faces. For a girl like myself, who had felt nothing but pain and hopelessness for years, something in me re-ignited. The spark, the fire, “el pasion”, came alive in me. “This is real,” I thought. I felt hope for the future.
That’s what I dare you to look for.
This year, find what makes your heart race, your eyes glisten with joy, your smile becomes genuine, find what you live for. Allow yourself to become vulnerable to the cruel world. The only way we will find hope, faith and love in the reality of pain in this world, is if we find what we were put on earth for, and live for it.
I’ll leave you with a quote from the brilliant and badass Walter White from hit TV show “Breaking Bad”, which inspired me one day to get out of bed…
"I have spent my whole life scared, frightened of things that could happen, might happen, might not happen, 50 years I spent like that. Finding myself awake at three in the morning. But you know what? Ever since my diagnosis, I sleep just fine. What I came to realize is that fear, that's the worst of it. That's the real enemy. So, get up, get out in the real world and you kick that bastard as hard as you can right in the teeth."
In 2016, I dare you to live.
