When people ask you about your favorite quote, they usually expect you to come up with something from Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama or Da Vinci.
Not me. My favorite motivational idea came – quite unexpectedly – from Matthew McConaughey.
In a 2011 interview with Esquire magazine, McConaughey related a conversation he had with a friend that has stuck with me ever since.
He relates that his friend said to him…
“Matthew, you’re into commas. Every time you think you’ve stopped, you always come out of it. Every time you think you’ve reached the end of that long dead-end street, you slip around the edge, past that stopping point, past the right angles.”
And McConaughey agreed!
“It’s all continuation! Even if you’re dying, that’s a kind of continuation, because you move on. And you have to change. Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that.
And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.”
This leads me to my tag line – Life is a series of commas, not periods.
Regardless of what happens around me, my life goes on. I don’t quit. In actuality, I CAN’T quit… there are no periods, remember?
I can only control what my life LOOKS LIKE between the commas. I can only control my own actions and keep on keeping on.
And, in my life experience, I’ve found that ultimately I will make it through anything life throws at me and I will be alright. Things will get better. I will be okay.
I powered through to graduate a year early from high school and then continued on to a college degree.
I made it through all sorts of craziness to raise two spectacular children.
I’ve been married, divorced, and am now incredibly happily remarried.
I’ve learned to live with and manage Bipolar Disorder.
I’ve been employed and laid off and employed and laid off, and have always been able to ride the wave and find new ways to support myself and my family.
As I write this, my husband and I are working our way through his diagnosis of kidney failure, combined with an episode of hypertensive retinopathy that almost blinded him, followe by a stroke that left him with considerable left-side paralysis.
And yet, we move on. From darkness into light and over and over again.
Comma after comma after comma.
And I can’t wait to see what the next one brings…
How about you? Do you have a favorite quote or life philosophy? Share it with us!