What I Know For Sure Page 10

  That day, Reverend Moss told a story that abides with me to this day. His father, a poor sharecropper, worked all his life to raise and care for his family, suffering the same sort of indignities and humiliations that generations before him had long endured. But in his fifties, he finally had a chance to do what those generations never had: cast his vote in an election. On election day, he rose before dawn, dressed in his best suit, the one he wore to weddings and funerals, and prepared to walk to the polls to vote against a racist Georgia governor in favor of a moderate. Six miles he walked; when he got there, he was told he was in the wrong place and was sent to another location. He walked another five or six miles and was met with the same denial before being sent to a third voting place. When he arrived at the third location, they told him, “Boy, you are a little late—the polls just closed.” After walking all day, covering more than 18 miles, he returned home, exhausted and depleted, never having experienced the joy of voting.

  Otis Moss Sr. told this story to anyone who would listen, and lived in great anticipation of his next chance to cast his vote. He died before the next election. He never got that chance to choose. So now I do. And every time I cast a ballot, I choose not only for myself but also for Otis Moss Sr. and for the countless others who wanted to but couldn’t. I cast a ballot for everybody who came before me and gave their life’s energy so that yours and mine could be a force that matters today.

  Sojourner Truth, speaking at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron in 1851, said, “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!” We’d see amazing changes if women took to the polls en masse.

  Recent voting statistics are embarrassing and disrespectful to our female heritage—to every woman who had no voice but hoped someday her daughters might be heard. In 2008, only about two-thirds of eligible female voters bothered to cast a ballot. And remember, the 2000 presidential election was decided by only 537 votes. I know for sure: We ought to respect ourselves and our forebears enough to be counted.

  We’re a country that spends 95 percent of our health care dollars on treating illness, and less than 5 percent on staying well and preventing it. How mixed up is that? The paradigm needs to change. And the change begins with how we choose to see ourselves: as purveyors of health or as conveyors of disease.

  The ultimate in being healthy is to operate at full throttle—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s being alert, feeling alive and connected. And if you look at your life as a circle and all its aspects (family, finance, relationships, work, among others) as sections of it, you’ll see that if one part is malfunctioning, it will affect the whole.

  There have been many times in my life when I’ve put far too much emphasis on work and not nearly enough on taking care of me. There’s a huge difference between attending to the needs of your personality (ego) and caring for your true self. Making that distinction can save you a lot of wasted time. This I know for sure.

  You’ve got to be in touch with your mind, body, and spirit to live the life you were meant to. When all three are completely engaged, you’re able to fulfill your potential on earth.

  It’s a decision you make: to pursue what you were called here to do and not just meander through your days. The average life expectancy for an American woman is 80. That’s a prediction, not a promise. What you do today creates every tomorrow.

  To own the abundant life that’s waiting for you, you’ve got to be willing to do the real work. Not your job. Not your career profile. But heeding your spirit, which is whispering its greatest desires for you. You’ve got to get silent sometimes to hear it. And check in regularly. You must feed your mind with thoughts and ideas that open you to new possibilities. (When you stop learning, you cease to grow, and subconsciously tell the universe you’ve done it all—nothing new for you. So why are you here?)

  You can’t pretend that your body will function forever no matter how you treat it. Your body wants to move; it wants to be fed well. If you’re sprinting through life as though it’s a race you have to win, you need to slow down and schedule some rest. Because the truth is, you’ve already won. You’re still here, with another chance to get it right, do better, and be better—starting now.

  Years ago on my show, a young mother shared her frustration with getting her son to go to bed. Her son was 3 years old and ruling the house. He wanted to sleep in her bed; he refused even to lie down in his own. And the more the mother insisted, the more the child resisted—yelling and screaming, until he literally dropped from exhaustion.

  We showed a tape of the two of them battling it out. When our expert, Dr. Stanley Turecki, finished watching, he said something that made the hairs on my arms stand up: “Nothing happens until you decide.” The reason this 3-year-old boy didn’t sleep in his own bed was that his mother had not decided it would happen. When she did, the child would go to his bed. He might cry and scream and rant until he fell asleep, but he would eventually realize that his mother had made up her mind.

  Well, I knew Dr. Turecki was speaking about a 3-year-old, but I also knew for sure that this brilliant piece of advice applied to many other aspects of life. Relationships. Career moves. Weight issues. Everything depends on your decisions.

  When you don’t know what to do, my best advice is to do nothing until clarity comes. Getting still, being able to hear your own voice and not the voices of the world, quickens clarity. Once you decide what you want, make a commitment to that decision.

  One of my favorite quotes is from mountaineer W. H. Murray:

  Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. / Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

  Make a decision and watch your life move forward.

  I’m always fascinated by lists of “Most Powerful People,” and by the ways they use external things—fame, status, wealth—to define and rank power. It’s curious how a person can go from the top of the list one year to unlisted the next—all in the blink of a board meeting. Was that person’s power real, or was the power only in the position? We often get the two confused.

  When I think of authentic power, I think of the power that occurs when purpose aligns with personality to serve the greater good. For me, the only real power is the kind that comes from the core of who you are and reflects all that you were meant to be. When you see this kind of power shining through someone in all its truth and certainty, it’s irresistible, inspiring, elevating.

  The secret is alignment: when you know for sure that you’re on course and doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, fulfilling your soul’s intention, your heart’s desire. When your life is on course with its purpose, you are at your most powerful. And though you may stumble, you will not fall.

  I went down to Louisiana five days after Katrina hit to witness for myself the disastrous effects of the hurricane. Maya Angelou described it so profoundly, saying, “The land became water, and the water thought it was God.”

  I spent no more than ten minutes in the Superdome in New Orleans, where thousands of families had waited and waited for five days for help to come. Days afterward, I thought I could still smell the urine and feces, mixed with the pungency of decaying flesh.

  I said on the air, “I think we all—this country—owe these families an apology.”

  The next day, Gayle Kin
g, who, in addition to being my best friend, is also O magazine’s editor at large, got a phone call from an irate reader canceling her subscription because “Oprah has gotten too big for her britches, telling us the government needs to apologize to those people.”

  What I know for sure is that behind every catastrophe, there are great lessons to be learned. One of the greatest: As long as we play the “us and them” game, we don’t evolve as people, as a nation, as a planet. Katrina gave us an opportunity to live in the space of an open heart and to show our compassion.

  Over the years, I’ve heard many people lamenting why God allows this or that. Another lesson: People suffer not because of what God does but because of what we do and do not do.

  So much of what happened in the aftermath of Katrina was man-made. And as we all saw, there was plenty of blame to go around. But the storm also gave us a chance to see that in moments of desperation, fear, and helplessness, each of us can be a rainbow of hope, doing what we can to extend ourselves in kindness and grace to one another. Because I know for sure that there is no them—there’s only us.

  In January 2009 I appeared on the cover of O twice: two versions of me standing side by side, a before and after. In one image, the before, I was in good shape. In the after, I was overweight. I had the confidence to show these photos of myself because I knew I wasn’t alone. An estimated 66 percent of American adults are either overweight or obese. And almost nobody’s happy about it.

  That cover stirred an outpouring of emotion and an avalanche of support. One of the most memorable responses I got was this e-mail from a friend: “Here’s how I see your weight—it is your smoke detector. And we’re all burning up the best part of our lives.”

  I’d never thought of it that way before, but it was a true aha moment. My weight was an indicator warning, a flashing light blaring my disconnection from the center of myself.

  What I now know for sure is that for me weight is a spiritual issue, not a food issue. Marianne Williamson struck a nerve when she sent this e-mail: “Your weight is really an invitation to your best life.”

  All those years of diets doomed to fail, I thought weight was the barrier. I told myself I had a weight “problem”—instead of looking at my out-of-balance existence and how I used food to repress the facts.

  I once coauthored a book with Bob Greene called Make the Connection. The title was his idea. Even while writing my part, which involved sharing my frustrated journal entries about being fat (I was 237 pounds when Bob and I met), I would often say to him, “Remind me again—what’s the connection?”

  I did learn from Bob that my overeating wasn’t about potato chips, that I needed to peel back the layers of my addiction to food and figure out what was eating me. Obviously, I didn’t peel deeply enough.

  But now I know that the connection is loving, honoring, and protecting everything about yourself. Bob has often said to me, “Your weight is ultimately tied to your feelings of unworthiness.” For years, I vehemently disagreed, saying, “Listen, Bob Greene, I’m not one of those people who think they don’t deserve what they have. I’ve worked hard for everything I own.”

  But as I move along the spiritual path to permanently resolving and managing the weight issue, I now see that a sense of unworthiness can come in many forms.

  I’ve been an overachiever since I was 3 years old. For years I felt the need to show that I belonged here—the need to prove my worth. I worked hard. I got A’s. I won speaking contests, earned scholarships. I was in my mid-thirties before I realized that just being born makes you worthy enough to be here. I had nothing to prove.

  For most of us who overeat, extra pounds correspond to unresolved anxieties, frustrations, and depressions, which all come down to fear we haven’t worked through. We submerge the fear in food instead of feeling it and dealing with it. We repress it all with offerings from the fridge.

  If you can conquer the fear, you’ll fly. That’s another “for sure.”

  Let your life awaken in you. Whatever your challenge—overeating, overindulging in any substance or activity, the loss of a relationship, money, position—let it be an open door to your holiest revelations about yourself, an invitation to your best life.

  I love to watch the sun set over Maui, transforming the sky. Nature has an easier time with transformation than we earthly beings do.

  Evolving as a human being is a lifelong excavation process—digging deep to uncover your underlying issues. Sometimes it feels like trying to shovel through Kilimanjaro. You keep hitting rock.

  What I’ve discovered, though: Rocks unattended turn into mounds, and then mountains. And it’s our job to do daily cleanups—in our work, our family, our relationships, our finances, our health.

  Ignoring problems is easier, for sure, but if we take even tiny steps to address them, those steps eventually become giant leaps on the journey to self-actualization.

  Reaching your potential as a person is more than an idea. It’s the ultimate goal. The wonders we’re capable of have nothing to do with the measurement of mankind, the lists of what’s in and what’s out, who’s hot and who’s not. I’m talking about the real deal: Whose life did you touch? Who did you love, and who loved you back?

  This I know for sure is what matters. For me, it’s the only goal worth aiming for: a transformation of consciousness that allows me to know that I am no better or worse than any other being. That I simply am.

  In the third grade, I learned the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I loved those words. I wrote them on everything and carried them around in my book satchel.

  I was a good-deed doer. At one point, I even thought I was going to be a missionary. Every Sunday, I would go to church, sit second pew to the right, take out a notepad, and write down everything the minister said. At school the next day, I would recite the sermon on the playground. I called it Monday-morning devotion. The other 8-year-olds would see me coming and say, “Here comes that preacher.” Back then, when the Progressive Missionary Baptist Church was trying to raise money for the poor children of Costa Rica, I started a campaign. I was going to collect more money than anyone else. I gave up my lunch money and convinced my classmates to do the same. It was all part of the principle of “Do unto others” that I lived by.

  Then, in the fifth grade, I ran into some problems. There was a girl in my class who didn’t like me, so I went around school talking about her. One of my friends pointed out that if I believed in doing unto others and was talking about this girl, chances are she was talking about me, too. “I don’t care,” I replied, “because I don’t like her, anyway.”

  For a long time, whenever I would say or do something that went against my better self, I would try to justify it to myself. What I didn’t understand is that all of our actions, both good and bad, come back to us. But eventually I learned that we receive from the world what we give to the world. I understand it from physics as the third law of motion: For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. It is the essence of what Eastern philosophers call karma. In The Color Purple, the character Celie explained it to Mister: “Everything you try to do to me, already done to you.”

  Your actions revolve around you as surely as the earth revolves around the sun.

  This is why, when people say they’re looking for happiness, I ask, “What are you giving to the world?” It’s like the wife who once appeared on my show wondering why her relationship with her husband had broken down. She kept saying, “He used to make me so happy. He doesn’t make me happy anymore.” What she couldn’t see was that she was the cause of her own effect. Happiness is never something you get from other people. The happiness you feel is in direct proportion to the love you are able to give.

  If you think something is missing in your life or you’re not getting what you deserve, remember that there’s no Yellow Brick Road. You lead life; it doesn’t lead you.

  See what comes into your life when you spend extra time with your children. Let
go of your anger with your boss or coworker and see what gets returned. Be loving to yourself and others and see that love reciprocated. This rule works every time, whether or not you are aware of it. It occurs in little things, big things, and the biggest things.

  Today I try to do well and be well with everyone I encounter. I make sure to use my life for goodwill. Because I know for sure that what I think, what I say, what I do—everything will be returned to me. And the same is true for you.

  WHAT I KNOW FOR SURE. Copyright © 2014 by Hearst Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.flatironbooks.com

  All the essays included in this book were previously published, in a slightly different form, in O, The Oprah Magazine.

  O, The Oprah Magazine and “What I Know for Sure” are registered trademarks of Harpo Print, LLC.

  Lyrics from “Stand” reprinted with the permission of Donnie McClurkin.

  Letter from Mattie J. T. Stepanek reprinted by permission of Mattie J. T. Stepanek, personal communication (www.MattieOnline.com).

  Edna St. Vincent Millay, excerpt from “On Thought in Harness” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1934, 1962 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Millay Society, www.millay.org.

  “You Ask About Poetry” reprinted with the permission of Mark Nepo.

  Excerpt from “Love After Love” from The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 by Derek Walcott, selected by Glyn Maxwell. Copyright © 2014 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.