I was just about to dive into my normal Saturday night routine with the kids, when suddenly my husband appeared with tears in his eyes. He choked on the words as he told me that our totally healthy, beautiful 3-month-old nephew, Shilo Eliezer of blessed memory, had died in his sleep that morning. The funeral would be in a few hours.

This weekend, as the rockets from Gaza began landing in Southern Israel again and my family experienced this tremendous loss, I felt the need to express my sadness and anger at death. This weeks’ blog was supposed to be about things I would tell my 25-year-old entrepreneurial self. I finished it already in my mind, just had not typed it out (one handed typing on a smart phone with a sick kid sleeping on me was not happening). After thinking about the things I wanted to tell my entrepreneurial self, I thought again about the things I needed to tell my regular old self. The things I forget as I hurry through life. The things we all could use a reminder about every now and again.

A post related to technical documentation/management will fill this space next week, but in the meantime, thanks for reading and allowing me to grieve and express in such a public way. 

These are the 10 life lessons I especially need to tell myself tonight. I hope you also find them useful.

1. There is actually no such thing as a deadline. Well, there is, and it is called DEATH. Otherwise, the date is an arbitrary line in the sand that someone - somewhere - drew for something. There is always a little bit more time or someone else in the project, thing, event, occasion, episode, document, deliverable or whatever it is that can or will be moved. Do not run your life on DEADlines, rather on LIFElines. If you are a boss, make sure the people who work for you can enjoy life around the schedules you give them. If not, be prepared to rearrange. People have lives to live in addition to their jobs.

2. Money does not bring happiness. In fact, I have lived my life with oodles of it and with none of it, and much prefer the none of it version to the crazy rich version. It is a rare person who can have a lot of money and truly be happy.  Just get what you get and don’t be upset. No really, don’t be. Just get over it and move on and focus your energy and time on good fulfilled living.

3. Don’t obsess over your stuff. You don’t come into the world with stuff. You can use it and enjoy it while you are here, but you can’t take it with you when you go. Enjoy it for what it is, but don’t obsess over it, covet it, stay up all night in the freezing rain to acquire it or do harm to yourself or another person for it. If all of your worldly possessions happened to burn down in a fire tonight, you would not really care as long as you and your loved ones were safe. You can live without all of it and quite happily too. You can’t ever enjoy a physical thing as much as you can enjoy living with a pure soul.

4. Make time for family. If you are a parent, put your cellphone down and play with your kids. Interact with them. Get to know them. Delight in them, and in the time you spend with them. Repeat the putting down the cellphone thing at least once a day until cured from thinking your other life (work, hobbies etc.) are as  important as your real life. So is your extended family. Make a date right now and have them over or go visit. You will never regret that time together or the memories you make.

5. Keep it real. The world has gone weirdly social and connected, but is more distant and less real than ever before.  It is now possible to spend all day “Liking” and not doing, “tweeting” without saying anything and adding your voice to the endless stream of noise, but essentially achieving  and changing nothing. I spent the last week getting more social while sort of checking out twitter for a new business venture. In that time, I amassed a good number of followers (350 crazy people that think I have something worthwhile to say!) and tweeted or direct messaged with the weirdest cross section of people it may be possible to collect in just 6 days. They included a very sweet new T.V. star, a fitness guru, a psych and holistic healer, lots of slick marketing folks, a world renown jewelry designer, a cat lady somewhere in a flyover state, a fundamentalist Iranian thinker who wants to obliterate my country and some professional tool people from the technical writing world. It is not only possible, but perhaps preferable, to keep connecting to your friends in the flesh who are right in front of you. Stop checking your email or Facebook or Twitter when sitting with friends and family. Relish and rejoice in human beings who can share their real life with you. (Side note to the person someone just told me broke off their relationship on FB chat:  do not EVER use social media to ask someone out or break up with them. Be a human being and do that face-to-face.)

6. Celebrate the world. The world outside is beautiful, magical, fleeting, inspiring, captivating, wonder-filled and, for the most part, free. Get outside and enjoy it. Enjoy the beauty that G-d creates everywhere. From the mad way that ants colonize and gather and can carry small animals up walls (how do they master project management so well with brains smaller than a grain of sand??!!) to the most magnificent sights and vistas. (The photos below are from my amazing cousin Beth, a skier/mountain climber extraordinaire, who is about to hike the Appalachian Trail. Yes, all 2179 miles of it! Go Beth, Go!) The only thing stopping you from celebrating the world around you is, well, you.

7. Celebrate beauty. Love is beautiful. Smiles are beautiful. Happy is beautiful. Chessed (kindness) is beautiful. Look in the mirror and see if those attributes are staring back at you. If not, work to change them and bring your beautiful back. Skinny, fat, white, black, Asian, Persian, Inupiaq, female, male, tall, short, blue, weird hair covering or whatever.  Still, all totally irrelevant with regards to true eye shining, soul reaching beauty. Dig on that for a moment and let it really sink in. My 4-year-olds get it…we all used to get it..don’t let mass media take that away from you.

8. Nourish your body. The food you prepare and eat should nourish your body. If it doesn’t, stop eating it. Don’t eat for any other reason other than to nourish your body.

9. Friends are the family you choose for yourself. Be a great friend to others and surround yourself with great people. Your friends should be people who inspire you, people you want to emulate and people you admire. If they aren’t , get new friends. No really, get new friends. I am blessed to have made and kept some of the world’s most fabulous people (fabulous= smart, funny, honest, sincere, loyal, kind, giving and generous) as my friends. They keep me grounded, safe, happy, searching and true to myself. Everyone deserves good friends. Go find the friends you deserve right now and be as good to them as you want them to be to you. 

10. Time. Time always seems to move fast when you want it slow, and slow when you want it fast. There are no do-overs, only try agains. Remember that you can’t store it or save it. There will always be 60 seconds in the next minute to do anything you can imagine. The question remains, how big is your imagination and how much are you willing to risk vs. gain in that time. Go long, think big and dig deep.

This blog is dedicated to Shilo Eliezer, z’l,  son of a loyal, caring dad who is a career IDF officer  and gentle, elegant, smart and loving mom who teaches math in public school to struggling students. Eliezer was the younger brother to three adoring older siblings, and loved by his entire extended family and community. He was loved, he was wanted, he was an important part of our family. He will be missed every day.  May his memory serve to remind all of us how truly precious life is, each and every day of it and bring each of us a little closer to what is real and important and good.

I hope to be back to my regular, snarky, light the world on fire, technical documentation managerial revolution to save the world and ward off the evil empire blog type stuff next week. In the meantime, if you have more things to add to this list, please leave your comments below.

With love for my life and the people I get to live and share it with,

Miriam