Words – little black symbols that magically fuse in your brain to form thoughts – morph into ideas and convictions that can rock your world.
Yep, the words we read are indeed powerful. They can help busy moms:
- Maintain sanity
- Keep their cool
- Gain perspective
- Stay out of jail
- Try on other skins when their own feels too constricting
“But how?” I can hear you ask. “Who has time to read?”
In my book Too Blessed to Be Stressed: Inspiration for Climbing Out of Life’s Stress-Pool, one of the techniques I suggest for decom-stressing is to add yourself to your daily to-do list. Seriously. Write your name right on there. Schedule a minimum of fifteen minutes twice a day to revive, regroup, and regenerate. Remove yourself from the stress source, even if it means walking a lap around the parking lot at work, or locking yourself in your closet like I did when my kids were small. I’d cuddle up beside my shoes with a comfy pillow and escape to Tara in my green-velvet-drapes gown, or solve a murder with Miss Marple, or LOL at the insane antics of the late, great Barbara Johnson.
Books taught me how to better raise my little monsters – I mean kids – and climb hand-over-hand out of the pit of depression. I learned how to relax and take laugh breaks. To air out my brain and relieve my constipated calendar. Over the years, books encouraged, consoled, and lit a bonfire under me. And they molded me.
I’m actually writing this today because books changed my life. I was a rabid reader as a child and was first enraptured by the magic of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle. Then as a teen, Christy by Catherine Marshall reached right down into my being and squeezed my soul. It changed my perspective. It changed my faith. And it planted a seed in me that one day I’d like to write a book that would touch other hearts the way Christy had mine.
But life, as life tends to do, got in the way. My dream was back-burnered as job, family, house, and responsibilities sucked up all my attention.
Fast-forward 25 years to a dentist office. My youngest child (whose name is … can you guess? Christy!) was about to fly the coop. As I sat in the waiting room praying about the void I felt in my future, I randomly opened a magazine to an ad for a writing contest. A light bulb flashed inside my head. Then a still, small voice whispered, “Deb, it’s time.”
Time to chase the dream implanted by a simple book so long ago.
Absolute magic.
So now, nine years, 100+ articles, thirteen books, and hundreds of speaking engagements later, I can say with authority that the written word can have a profound impact on us. If we let it.
So what are you waiting for, girlfriend? Grab your Kindle, or your paperback, or your audio novel and let the magic begin!
Guest contributor Debora M. Coty is a popular speaker, humorist, columnist and author of 13 books, including the newly released More Beauty, Less Beast as well as Mom NEEDS Chocolate and Too Blessed to be Stressed. She lives and loves in central Florida with her husband Chuck and desperately wicked pooch Fenway. Visit with Deb online at www.DeboraCoty.com