Cheryl Richardson: Waking Up in Winter
There’s a lot of people dealing with aging parents, for example, right now who don’t want to talk about death, they aren’t prepared in any way for the end of their lives, are maybe irritable, angry, difficult, negative. I mean, I hear this from people dealing with aging parents.
Victor Fuhrman: The beautiful thing about being able to have elderly parents, especially those who still have their mental vitality and are conversational, is that you can learn a lot by listening. Just, a lot of us growing up have a lot of issues with our parents when we’re growing and being rebellious and so on. And sometimes, as we approach their senior years, just sit and give them an opportunity to share their story with you.
Cheryl Richardson: Yes. My dad died a year ago. He died in November of 2016. And one of the things he did about, oh, maybe ten, maybe five years before he died is he started to write his life story, and every Christmas, he would give all of us, I’m one of seven children, he would give each of us a chapter of his life.
And I was amazed. Dad never got to finish his life. I think he made it up through probably right around the age of 50, but I learned things about my father I never knew that was amazing and that really changed, completely changed my perspective on who he was as a man, changed my perspective in my childhood, changed my perspective on our relationship.
Victor Fuhrman: And the gift of listening, just to give people the sacred space to tell their story and to be there to listen to them.
Cheryl Richardson: Yeah, and record the stories. I mean, don’t be afraid to record those stories, if they’ll give you permission to do so because they will be so priceless.
Victor Fuhrman: Cheryl, in all your books and audios and videos, speaking and coaching, you’ve always encouraged people with ways to become their best selves and to find grace in daily life and in building the life of their choosing. Do you think that all the tools you’ve shared in the past work for the over 50 crowd? Do we need a new roadmap in finding what’s important?
Cheryl Richardson: I’ll be honest with you, I think every single book that I’ve written, every workshop that I’ve delivered or every audio that I’ve created of a workshop when I think about the workshop I did with Louise–there’s a DVD called You Can Trust Your Life. And Louise and I did a two-day workshop in London together before a few years before she died. She was in her 80s. The material that we were sharing was just as applicable to somebody in their 80s or 90s as it was to somebody in their early 20s and teens. I mean, she was one of these amazing women in that people would come to our workshops, and there would be three generations, three generations of people.
And so, this next stage of my writing in my life is really about the art of writing, the art of living each day as if it were our last in some ways and really using–the soul is here to experience life, not to accomplish anything. It’s here to experience life. And I want to experience as much of it as I possibly can, and I want to share that experience with my readers.
Victor Fuhrman: Is there a point in life that we should just let go of the dreams that never came true, or should we never let go of our most important dreams but modify them or change our perception of things?
Cheryl Richardson: I think what’s important is that we, on a consistent basis, we evaluate our dreams, we reevaluate where we are. We really don’t take the time to stop, get quiet, spend time alone, really looking at, okay, what are my goals moving forward. Are they my dreams and goals, are they my desires? What is it that I desire now at this point in my life? And I think we really have to reevaluate that and look more deeply at the answers to those questions so that we know that we’re authentically today, not who we used to be or who we think we should be.
Living an examined life is deeply important. To check under the hood, right, our willingness to our commitment to our own evolution, to the soul’s evolution and to remember that the soul is here to experience life, the good and the bad, the easy and the hard, the painful and the joyful.
