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The many of you have heard of Andres Gregory, my dinner with Andrei, and a man asked him about his writing.

And he responded with a story about his wife. She was going into surgery and he realized

he was belatedly and this was after she was put under anesthesia. He hadn't really said what he had wanted to, what he needed to say to her.

So he made this commitment that when she woke up, that he would speak his heart, this would be his way of communicating as if for the last time.

And then his message to the person asking the question was, write like that.

Write as if you are expressing your heart as if for the last time.

Live like that. Live your moments as if this is it. Let it matter. Let it come from a remembrance of what you most care about.

So it's a beautiful message. It's one that many of us resonate with because we have a sense of how

most days or many days we move through kind of in this translike way that we're either trying to get through the day in some way or

there's a sense that this life is going to go on forever and it just we're on kind of an automatic.

And it's a bit of a sleepwalking or else we're feeling just driven through the day by wants and fears.

But there's certainly not that sense of the moments live this one as if it's the last.

Speak your heart as if this is it. So one of the questions that is often brought up, especially after a retreat where we've spent a lot of moments coming into

the present is how does this presence help me in making the big decisions in my life? How does it help me in really remembering what matters and remembering my

inner wisdom? How do I access that in the midst of the frenzy? You know, William James described it. He said,

in this ceaseless frenzy, always thinking we should be doing something else, which to me is very relatable to. So there's a forgetting and there's a wonderful Jewish parable that I actually come across twice in the same month.

So I thought I'd share it. And it goes like this that before an infant is born, the angel of conception infuses that infant with all the wisdom that he or she will need through life.

And then the angel puts her finger on the child's lips and says,

and it's as if there's this ceiling of a secret pack between that child and God. And as the story goes, that's why we all have an indentation on our upper lip.

So it's this this kind of a sh sh sh. And the way my understanding of this parable is that the wisdom is here. It's innate in each of us, but it's only available in the silence.

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