creedless

Personal mottos.  This idea fascinates me today.  I heard it first when Oprah asked Jim Carrey what was his.  He said, "I am heaven."  At first he didn't explain it, as if the meaning of that should be obvious.  But there were just way too many directions we could have gone with that, so he finally explained.  He said too many people wait around for heaven to happen someday and be somewhere else, but he reminds himself that it's right here and now.  That's a paraphrase, and I make no comment on his actual motto but merely the awe and amazement I felt that he was able to answer the question.  He first qualified the fact that he has many creeds by which he lives, but that is the one he shared with us, the adoring public.  Can I call us that?  I mean, he's pretty cool.  Anyway . . . 

I am notorious for watching moments like that in an interview and panicking.  What happens in my inevitable someday when I'm in an interview like that and someone asks me that question?! Or more likely, what if someone asks me in the grocery store?  I have no idea what my life creed is.  As the little girl says of the cost of a plane ticket in Sleepless in Seattle, "It changes practically every day."  

Which reminds me that I may not know what my life creed is, but Nora Ephron has probably written it down somewhere.  My MySpace motto is from her as well, "I lead a small life . . . .")

When I downloaded several songs from iTunes the other day, I could have come up with a life motto.  Probably "Give Me Jesus".   There's something about that song - you can have all this world, just give me Jesus.  That one almost always feels true.  But when "Boondocks" came on, I gotta say it felt sorta like my motto too.  I like that I am finally learning to be proud of where I came from.  Another country song I downloaded was "Better Life" by Keith Urban, known in my head as Someday, Baby.  It played quite a bit the year I had cancer, and it was nice to find lighter moments in which we could hope for a future happier than the trial we were in.  I'm a big someday girl.   But I never leave it at that.  I would have to add into my creed something about Living for Today because that's another important one I gleaned from the aforementioned Year with Health Crisis.   

So you see what I mean?  Oprah asks me that question someday and she's going to be staring at the business end of a panic attack.  There's no way I'm pulling it off like Jim did.  Except of course, that I'll be thinking about it from here on out.   Any of you willing to attach yourself to a life creed of some sort?  You can't take "I am heaven".  That's Jim's.