Thank you, Mr. President

Dear President Obama,

In this last hour of your presidency, I’m overwhelmed with so many feelings. Big emotions. Good and bad. Some fearful, some hopeful.

But nothing compares to the gratitude I feel for you, for your tireless and undaunted commitment to making life better, more just and more promising for all people — regardless of who they are, what challenges they face or how they vote.

In your good-bye letter to the American people, you said we made you a better man. I don’t doubt that, because that’s the kind of leader you are. Someone who embraces the value of every lesson learned, whether in victory or defeat, as an opportunity to deepen your understanding of the great problems of our time and keep forging ahead to solve them.

Thank you for setting such a profoundly positive example of the grit it takes to be a leader.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about grit lately. I had to summon a more of it than I ever thought I had in me during my fight against breast cancer. (Spoiler alert: I won.)

Curious about the source(s) of strength that got me through the toughest year of my life, I recently listened to Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance while training for my first half marathon, which I ran eight months after wrapping up my treatment.

Chapter by chapter, Angela Duckworth fascinated me with her insights about grittiness. Each time I listened during one of my long runs, the wisdom resonated with me so powerfully, it felt like she was my very own mind-reading therapist.

On my first run after the 2016 election, in the “Culture of Grit” chapter, she tells the story of the research she did shadowing Pete Carroll and the Seattle Seahawks in the days after their epic loss in Super Bowl XLIX. She wanted to learn “how a culture of grit continues not just in the afterglow of success, but in the aftermath of failure.”

When I heard these words that Pete’s fond of sharing, quoting idol John Wooden (quoting Winston Churchill), a dismal wave of anxiety faded away.

“Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”

Your days in the Oval Office may be over, but I’m grateful as ever for the eight years you spent in it, and for the grit that I know will continue to guide you.

Thank you for being a leader who has the audacity to hope — even when all hope seems lost.

Thank you, Mr. President. For everything.

Yours truly,

Liz Murtaugh Gillespie

P.S. I’m posting this letter on my blog WRITE ON: Writing through life’s twists and turns with grit and gratitude.

P.P.S. Your final speech as president inspired my last post: “You never really understand a person …”

#grit #gratitude #Obama #hope #leadership #PeteCarroll #Seahawks #AngelaDuckworth

You never really understand a person ...

No words in literature have ever resonated more profoundly with me than the advice Atticus Finch gave his daughter, Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird.

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... Until you climb inside inside his skin and walk around in it.”

What a powerful moment it was when Scout stood on Boo Radley’s porch and recalled those wise words of compassion and tolerance. When she looked past the ill-founded notions she and everyone in town harbored about her recluse of a neighbor, she saw a genuine goodness in Boo. It surprised her.

“Atticus, he was real nice …”

“Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”

I never thought these words could mean more to me than they have all the years since I first read them. Not until President Obama called them out in his final address to the nation.

My eyes welled up with tears as I drove my son home from hockey practice. I turned up the volume and told Tyler to listen closely. I didn’t want either one of us to miss a single word.

I’ll admit, a time or two as Obama spoke, I wondered what the hell kind of jackass insult @realDonaldTrump might unleash about it in a 3 a.m. tweet.

Then I stopped and thought about what Atticus or Obama might say if I shared my harsh pre-judgement out loud.

“Come on, now, Liz … be better than that. Your next president might be a dim-witted bigot, but you’re not going to make the situation any better by fixating on that. Forget the tweets. Question his ideas, challenge his policies, get involved some way, some how. Make a difference.”

(OK, yes … Atticus and Obama each surely would've used more respectful and righteous words than I did there. I'm gonna need some time to fully channel Atticus' credo when it comes to our 45th president.)

In the years to come (not just the next four), I will read and re-read, listen and re-listen, watch and re-watch these words. They will remind me how grateful I am for Obama's inspiring and thoughtful leadership. They will challenge me to summon the grit it will take to honor ideals like these:

“Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power. We, the people, give it meaning — with our participation, and with the choices that we make and the alliances that we forge.”

“It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy. Embrace the joyous task we have been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours because, for all our outward differences, we in fact all share the same proud type, the most important office in a democracy, citizen.”

“Show up, dive in, stay at it. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose. Presuming a reservoir in goodness, that can be a risk. And there will be times when the process will disappoint you. But for those of us fortunate enough to have been part of this one and to see it up close, let me tell you, it can energize and inspire.”

In his closing remarks, Obama said, “Yes, we can. … Yes, we did.”

Yes, we will.

We must.

#grit #Obama #AtticusFinch

Introducing WRITE ON

With cancer in the rear view, it’s time to move on from CaringBridge

and introduce you to my new blog.

I'm calling it WRITE ON because that's what I did throughout my up-and-down-and-up-again experience with cancer.

To which I say: RIGHT ON!

You feel me?

If you followed me on CaringBridge, you know I started blogging about The Big C for purely pragmatic reasons.

Back when my diagnosis was breaking news, I didn’t want to begin every conversation with every person I ran into with an update about cancer. So I started sharing my story on CaringBridge.

The more I wrote, the more I realized that the act of writing was becoming therapeutic for me. It helped me edit out the things I didn’t need to worry about. Somehow, sharing the highs and lows, the many decisions I had to make, the moments of humor that helped me laugh through the horror of it all — all of that helped me wrap my head around everything that was happening.

The first time someone thanked me for sharing my story so candidly, I thought, “What the heck?! Thank YOU for reading it so I don’t have to explain it for the 147th time.”

As I kept writing, readers kept finding new ways to make me feel like I was doing them the favor.

What?!

Sometimes, even through a smile, I cringed when folks called me courageous or inspiring when all I was doing was trying to make it through one day after another without imploding into a convulsing fountain of tears in front of my kids.

(For the record, I did just that more times than I can recall.)

Not long after my diagnosis, during the excruciating waiting game(s) that followed test after test as my doctors tried to figure out just how many tumors I had and where, I called cancer "an evil son-of-a-bitch that does not and never will define me."

My attitude has softened since then. I'm not bitter anymore.

Cancer happened. It is and always will be part of my life story. I used to picture it as a dark cloud that would follow me around forever. I don't see it that way anymore.

It's just there. And I'm here — grateful I made it through the toughest experience of my life, feeling strong, happy and ready for the challenges I'll face in the years to come.

I've learned a lot about myself in the last year, a lot about grit and gratitude and lots of things that I'll write about in WRITE ON.

I'll still write about cancer (you'll see I've migrated all my CaringBridge posts over here), but this is not "a cancer blog." I'll also write about podcasts and books that inspire me. Funny and memorable conversations I have with people. Things I learn from my kids when they test my patience and/or help me better understand what it takes to be a gritty, grateful parent.

So ... here goes. A new blog for the new chapter(s) that lie ahead.

#CaringBridge #cancer #grit #laughter #gratitude #diagnosis