I recently came across a pad of notes from about five years ago. I was launching a coaching business and had spent a day jotting down ideas for a blog, book, and speeches. Possible topics included: Paradoxes: Wrestling With Conflict Choosing Battles Learning From Failures: Bouncing Back From Your Setbacks What Do I Want to be When I Grow Up? Our Yearnings to be Loved, Valued, Accepted, Appreciated Crazy. Five years ago, I was wrestling with some of the same ideas that you will read about in these pages. And fifteen or twenty years ago, I was writing stories and poems with these same themes; you'll read some of them here. Consistency might be a virtue, but am I in a rut? The biblical book of Ecclesiastes says that what was will be again, what happened will happen again, and there is nothing new on this earth. This sounds tedious, as though life is just a series of cliches and we are the cast of the movie "Groundhog Day." While the thought of sharing the screen with Bill Murray is stirring, living the same stories as yesterday - and each other - is less so. Writing our own stories can be a profoundly vain activity. E. B. White put it this way: "Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays." Our computer screens become the mirrors where we stare at our written reflections. It can become all about us. I thought of writing about what friends and family have experienced, or about fictional characters. But for now those projects are further down the list. These are my stories, the ones that I am authorized to tell. I hope that as you read them they will resonate - not just because they echo your experiences, but because our lives all have the same themes. My hope is that you will see yourself in what I describe here. Each of us is unique, but we are more alike than different. So are our stories. As much as we differ in what excites us, validates us, or negates us, we are all searching for the same things. We yearn for someone to approve of us, some way to certify our worth, something to confirm that we are acceptable. We arrive in the world with this yearning. We ache to fill the emptiness so we try every snake oil on the market. When one fails us we move to the next, and the next, finding diversions but not the love whose scarcity leaves gaping holes in our souls. There is a purpose for this pain. It prods us back toward the only love that can fully sate our hunger and quench our thirst. This is the love that we burn for but rarely dare to dream about. We need it more than our next breaths. But after chasing proxies day after month after year after lifetime, we end where we began: longing, regretful, and wounded. Enter grace. My daughter-in-law, Faith, is a singer, songwriter, artist, and writer. Her song "Grace" includes this lyric: Hope took the train To the shoreline today And faith took a bus To get on the next train But grace is still dancing Still finding her light So maybe we're gonna be fine As we wander about, seeking love and settling for stand-ins, we struggle to numb the ache within. And when the surrogates we stand upon violently shake and leave us lying in the ruins, our hope and faith may end up beneath the rubble with us. My foundations have been shaken. Career and achievements lie shattered; hope and faith were wounded. As I rub the dust from my eyes, I look for the love that will lift me from the wreckage. I step on the dance floor, with stories to tell, hoping that grace will dance with me. These are my stories."