Does your moral compass point true north? Or is it a little askew? And how would you know? There are, of course, people now and through history who thought they were doing right when everyone else knew otherwise. So how do you know where your moral compass is pointing?

Has life been one unbearable trial after another? Have you been beaten up and chewed up and spit out by a history that has left you maimed, scarred and bloodied? Have you ever considered that the very pain of life has fertilized the soil of your heart to yield fruit it could have produced in no other way?

Life is really an accumulation of daily small stuff that adds up to one huge thing called living. It’s also called love … and kindness … and family.

Some people are preemptively dying more than actively living. Their minds don’t move much. They lay their dreams and aspirations on the bed and hide their opportunities in the closet and wait for life to do something.

Life is a journey, a challenge to be mastered, but more importantly, to be learned from. But lessons, and the growth they promote, don’t come to us by taking the easy path. Downhill is still downhill. It takes you to the bottom. Paths of least resistance have always been attractive … until you get to where such paths take us.

We are all different, doing different things, living different lives, coming to this point in time, right now as you read these words from different trajectories with different backgrounds and circumstances. So why do we think we all need to do the same things, look the same way, act like everyone else and live the same lives? The obvious answer is that we don’t!

Have you heard of the parable of the long spoons? It goes something like this: A man was once taken on a tour of hell and was surprised by what he saw …

For this Valentine’s Day, I offer you some of my most pithy thoughts on humanity’s favorite topic. Perhaps you’ll even find a nugget of wisdom buried amongst all the pith as well!

Today is a wholly new day unlike any previous set of 24 hours. This day will never reoccur. It will never return. It is unique unto itself. How are you going to live it?

Life has the tendency of stretching us, calling from us more than we thought we had inside. The miracle of this process is that when we stretch, we rarely return to the same dimension we were before the stretch.

Procrastination is an insidious habit that makes life more hectic, hurried and panicked. It robs us of peace, undermines excellence and degrades the joy that excellence produces. But does procrastination always undermine excellence, happiness and peace? Perhaps not.