When we are grieving it’s hard to just get out of bed let alone experience life passionately and purposefully.  I know that we were created to live deliberately, not postponing joy for some time in the future, but how do you get to that point in your journey? Wherever you may be in your grief, I invite you to live deliberately.  With each tick of the clock, a moment of your life is forever gone.  When our loved ones found out their time was limited they struggled through the stages of grief, from shock, denial, guilt, anger and for some acceptance.  They seemed to gain clarity about what being alive means and too late they realized how precious each moment was.  We need to have their clarity of purpose and a renewed passion for the things that really matter. If we lived deliberately as if our time was limited (which it is) we would spend our days differently. There is a saying that our entire life is reduced to two dates (birth and death) and the one little dash between them.  Our lives come down to what transpired between those two dates – what is in our dash. We don’t have control over many things in life – our birth, our parents, where we lived and its culture or the date of death.  But we do get to decide how we are going to live our dash.  We get to choose how we spend our time – living deliberately with joy or spending precious time chasing things that don’t really matter or focusing on the past which cannot be changed. To live deliberately is to simply appreciate your time, what you do and the people you do it with.  Don’t just drift along not knowing where the day went.  Most of us sense that there is more to life than we are demanding.  Many of the things you do today that make sense are meaningless in the future. I’m challenging you to start living your life as if it was more precious than gold:  live in joy, love completely with no holding back, learn everything you can about positive living and go after life boldly. At the end of your life will you be ready or will you be begging death for more time to live?  Death may very well say, “I gave you last week and 52 weeks in just the last year alone.  What have you done with the time you already had?”  Will you say, “I didn’t think it mattered?” Before you start listing all the physical things you want, you need to be quiet and think about what you really want because you only have one life.  You can get more money if you waste it, but time spent wastefully is forever gone and can never be replaced. You and only you control your thoughts, dreams and actions. So, what do you really want? To Our Shared Journey,                                                                                       Mary Francis is a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist®, Certified Law of Attraction Facilitator, Early Intervention Field Traumatology (EIFT), and the Author/Founder of "The Sisterhood of Widows"