Live everyday like it’s your first

I got to see Suleika Jaouad and Jon Batiste perform live a few weeks ago - such a treat.

I read Suleika’s first memoir, about 4 years ago and cried so much as it was the beginning of my mom and my journey of I grieving her old self. She’s still alive, but lewy body dementia has taken her muscles and her cognition and her attention and her laughter and her worrying about me and her social butterflying hosting abilities away from her. So when I heard Suleika was coming to town to promote her next book, The Book of Alchemy, I couldn’t wait. The book is a genre of it’s own, my husband named the genre, “short story memoirs”. I love memoirs, but short story memoirs, they hold a special place in my heart. :) And this book, which I just finished because I was trying to savor it, has writing prompts at the end of each story, some of which I’ll be using with my clients. Yay!

The book tour was also a genre of it’s own, although we haven’t coined a new term for it yet. It was part spoken word, part song, part conversation, part musical improv. Suleika started by reading some of her own excerpts from the book. Then she read one or two others. The stage had a couch, a coffee table filled with her journals and a piano. Her husband, Jon was on stage the whole time too. They talked about her life, and when they first met each other and their live together. Jon read his short story aloud. Then Jon played an original song (that I also cried during), all of his music has that effect on me.

And they ended very poetically with a prompt — instead of living each day like it’s your last, what if we lived each day like it’s our first — with that same sense of curiosity that we had at birth?