Thanks, Kristen and Frank, for the reminder...

About a year ago, sometime last February of 2009, I got an email from someone, from a gal who I was getting emails from every week, but this email was different. Usually, these every-week emails were happy hour invitations. A place, a time, and a new location for where happy hour was going to be each Thursday night for that week would arrive in my in-box.

I never went to the happy hours, as there was always something getting in the way (which was probably just me being a school-night-going-out wimp), and I still haven’t gone to one of these happy hour events. But, I still love to get the emails. Just knowing there is a wonderfully active group out there doing happy together for an hour or more every Thursday night, a group who would welcome me to join in, well, that makes me smile. And, even though I now work even further away from where the group makes their Thursday night hours happy (I’d have to drive in traffic for more than an hour to join the group), I still plan to go one of these days. But, I digress.

I want to share what was different about that email in February last year, and how every once in a while I get an email from this gal, the Happy-Hour coordinator, which is different. We’ll call our happy hour coordinator Thursday. It should be known that Thursday is not just a great gatherer of people for social good. She uses her email powers and distribution list for greater good, too. Thursday has helped kittens find new homes. She’s helped friends find new roommates. And in that February email, Thursday helped a couple in need raise money to redo their home.

Really, re-doing their home? What? That’s what you might be thinking. Why pitch in for new curtains and a couch cover for some strangers? Yeah, not that kind of re-doing their home. The email Thursday sent contained information on a silent-auction fundraiser which was being held for this couple who needed to create a handicap accessible home for the husband who, on their wedding night (just a couple months prior), in celebration of their nuptials had broken his neck upon jumping into a swimming pool.

First, can you imagine that? You are about to start a new life with your mate, with the person—the family—you have chosen (water is about to become thicker than the blood), and not long after you’ve said, “Yes, I DO plan to spend forever with you…for better or for worse,” (whatever worst you imagined was probably just old age 30 extra pounds), worser than worse happens. Never did you think or plan that ‘worse’ meant several surgeries to come and just as many grueling rehabilitation sessions to follow for your mate, just to see if your partner, the love of your life, will have any use of their arms and legs again. Never did you think the trajectory of your life would alter so dramatically that how life was lived before is now so distant, the distance and differences have become painful.

It is un-imaginable, isn’t it? That is just one of the things in life where we think it can only happen to other people. Other people get in car accidents. Other people lose a child. Other people know someone who committed suicide. Other people know someone who was killed. Other people have an accident and become handicapped. Other people experience tragedy.

The truth is that we are the other people when it happens to us. And, it happened to someone who was a friend of someone I knew. I also have two quadriplegic friends, so it happened to them, too. Anything, bad or good, can happen to us. We can be that person who won that million in the lottery, or that person hit by a drunk driver. That’s why I try not to take life, my limbs, my sight, my hearing, my sense of humor, my friends, my family, any of it for granted.

Anyway, I was very moved by the story sent in that silent-auction informational email. So much so, I forwarded on that email to everyone in my contact list and asked all of my contacts to contribute what they could if they could. I wasn’t asking anything I was not going to do. I sent the couple a donation via snail mail. What surprised me, is that one of my friends replied to this forwarded email by telling me that her husband had dated the wife in high school.

Small world, isn’t it? You think you are asking your friends to help out people who are even strangers to you, but those strangers are even closer to those who you love.

In that February email, I learned that the wife, Kristen Alioto, who was connected to Thursday’s friend, my friend’s hubby, and now had a connection to Thursday, all the happy hour folks, and to me and all my friends, had married Frank Alioto in mid December in Mexico. You may be asking why I have, when I rarely do, shared the real names of this couple. I’ve given their true identities because they showed up in my living room. Not actually in person, but on my television. Frank and Kristen Alioto were featured on BREAKTHROUGH with Tony Robbins.

Holy crap! I thought. The minute the show started to navigate through the couple’s story, I knew it had to be the same people I’d learned about more than a year earlier. I had to send Thursday an email, to ask her. Thursday was sure it was them, too, but both of us needed that confirmation from the friend of Thursday’s who had sent Thursday the original request (to send out the silent-auction info) in the first place.

The other day Thursday confirmed that, yes, Kristen and Frank are, indeed, the couple who that February email was for. So now I ask you: Am I the only one who still believes that everything and everyone are connected?

This isn’t my first experience like this, realizing that the people I know are connected to others in ways I would not have guessed. This is not the first time I’ve seen how far away one can go and still run into someone they know or someone who knows who they know. I can remember being in a bar with Emily in New Orleans (pre-Katrina) and meeting a guy who lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida. This guy knew and had played volley ball with my ex-boyfriend (an ex who lived near Cocoa Beach, Florida).

One New Years eve, when I was living in South Lake Tahoe, as I was sandwiched between a big, sweaty guy and a short, bald man, and was being pulled through a squishing-through-room-only crowd on the South Lake Tahoe Casino streets by my best friend and roommate at the time (Jen’s older sister), I ran into two guys I knew from high school. This small-world experience worked out for these guys I’d known from high school especially well. (We’ll call them high school guys 1 & 2.)

See, the 3rd guy in the group (who I did not know) who was with high school guys 1 & 2, he got thrown in jail that night for slapping a cop on his ass. Not a problem for 1 & 2, except this cop-fanny-slapping friend had the key to 1 & 2’s hotel room with him.

Lucky for 1 & 2, Jen’s older sister and I had the room for them to stay with us that night. Lucky for me, I’d always had a crush on high school guy 1, so the room I found was in my bed and I got myself a nice little make-out session that night. Not so lucky, I learned that one session was all I’d want, thanks. (How fast does morning come?)

The connections keep on coming. Another friend of mine, like many of my friends, met her mate on the internet. What’s special about this particular friend’s story is that she dated her hubby’s brother, who she also met on the internet, for just a couple of dates, a year prior. By her second date with hubby-to-be, she realizes that hubby-to-be is the brother of that nice guy she didn’t romantically hit it off with before. (Both hubby-to-be’s brother and this friend of mine had agreed it was more friendly than romantic). This led my friend and her hubby-to-be to figure they were bound to meet somehow.

To me, their story is just awesome. It shows me that the universe was lining up connections for a year trying to make it happen for my friend and her hubby.

So as I was watching that Tony Robbins special, and Tony is doing and saying all those things that make him Tony Robbins, all I can think is about the connectivity of things, even the connectivity of messages. Timing and circumstance can be everything…especially the last piece of the connected puzzle. Imagine how much more open someone might have been to hear the message(s) Tony Robbins was trying to get across because those life messages were coming through Kristen and Frank’s story?

Someone might have heard the same things said a thousand times before, and may have needed to hear those messages a thousand times over, but the message(s) never got in. But then, after listening to Kristen and Frank share their struggles and triumphs, BAM, in it goes. The message is delivered.

It all just makes you think (or, it should).

Frank’s arms and legs don’t work like mine do anymore, but my body, Frank’s body, that’s not where we make the most change in our lives. Change starts in our minds, just as Tony Robbins communicated, and just as I’ve been learning (from every source that will give it to me). That’s why I am convinced, more and more every day, that everything real, everything significant, and everything we need to understand, it isn’t in the physical body, it isn’t in physical things. It’s in the intangible.

It’s in the Now.

It’s in our spirits, in our character, our actions, and in our hearts.

The past cannot be changed. The future is unknown. Therefore tragedy, once accepted, once brought into the Now (rather than what could have been, or what will never be) can become something other than tragedy. I imagine that Frank’s story, his tragedy has inspired millions, millions who aren’t even facing half of what Frank has faced or will face. But those millions needed to see what Frank could overcome to understand that they are capable of overcoming their own hurdles, and that takes away some of the tragedy of Frank’s hardship.

Now we all know I am just as much of a complainer as everyone else. I don’t want to work for a living anymore (unless it means I’m getting paid to write or paint). I hate noise, especially neighbor noise (my new neighbors are just as noisy-F’rs!!!). I’m not getting laid again (still miss Watt). Some people are idiots (I’ve run into some annoying situations lately). But, whatever we think our real issues are, whatever we think is holding us back, be the noise next door, the person under our skin, our weight, our lack of weigh, our limbs (working or not), or whether we don’t think we are handsome/pretty enough, smart enough, any of it, it’s all crap. It’s all noise. The worst kind of noise. (Gawd I hate noise!)

We have to face our true issues. We have to ask ourselves, what’s really going on inside that makes me doubt my true beauty, my own intelligence, and my deepest strengths? What’s making me focus on the clunking hills of the new neighbor upstairs instead of the myriad of other things that are unfolding before me in my life? What’s making me think my ass matters and not my heart?

Why do any of us tell ourselves that we are separate, alone, without resources? We aren’t. If Frank and Kristen’s story (before it was even on TV) can move a stranger, me, to donate when I didn’t have much money to give at the time, why would my small, small act be any different than the bigger acts, the larger picture, the vast connections that are all just waiting to unfold before us when we are open to them?

The answer is: There’s no difference. We have to decide that all things are possible in our lives because all things ARE connected. We need to reach beyond the limitations—the illusions—that have held us back. We need to change our paradigms and let go of whatever negative patterns we’ve slipped into.

Ready?

I am.

I want my life to get more and more fabulous each day, and not because a shiny red car shows up (I don’t even like red cars) or because I get my dream job (paid for writing/painting), or because the man of my dreams delivers hot-loving sex to my front door. I want my life to get more fabulous because I am choosing Now as the place to be the happiest…no matter where I’ve come from or where I am going.

I think it is more than possible to be happy with whatever we have Now once we realize that we are not alone.

BTW, I fully realize that I repeat myself a lot in all of my blog posts (connections this, Now that, bigger picture here, go-get’m there, and so on and so forth), but let me ask: Wouldn’t anyone rather repeat to themselves and to other, and practice (over and over) believing and communicating, the good things in life, that is as opposed to being the broken record who plays a crappy song over and over?

Yeah, me too.

So thanks, Kristen and Frank, for the reminder that I don't have much to complain about and for the inspiration to reach higher.