What I Know For Sure (11 page)

Around my fiftieth birthday,
I became more aware of time than I had ever been. I felt an almost primal understanding in the core of myself that there was a finite amount of time left, and that feeling permeated everything I did, dictating how I reacted in every moment. It made me more conscious and appreciative of every experience, every awakening (
Gee, I’m still here; I have another chance today to get it right
). I still try to take in all experiences, even the negative ones. I take the time, even if it’s only one minute in the morning, to breathe slowly and let myself feel the connection to all other breathing and vibrating energies in this world and beyond. I have found that recognizing your relationship to infinity makes the finite more palatable.

What I know for sure is that giving yourself time to just be is essential to fulfilling your mission as a human being. So I give myself Sundays. Sometimes I spend the whole day in my pajamas, sometimes I have church under the trees communing with nature. Most times I just do nothing—piddling, I call it—and let my brain and body decompress. Whenever I’ve slipped up and missed a Sunday, I’ve noticed a definite change in my disposition for the rest of the week. I know for sure that you cannot give to everybody else and not give back to yourself. You will end up empty, or at best, less than what you can be for yourself and your family and your work. Replenish the well of yourself, for yourself. And if you think there’s no time to do that, what you’re really saying is, “I have no life to give to or live for myself.” And if you have no life to live for yourself, then why are you here?

About a decade ago I learned a big lesson. The phone was always ringing on Sundays, when I had set that aside as my time. I’d answer and feel agitated and irritable with the person who’d called. Stedman said to me on one of those occasions, “If you don’t want to talk, why do you keep picking up the phone?” Aha moment: Just because the phone is ringing doesn’t mean I have to respond. I control what I do with my time. We all do, even when it seems out of control. Protect your time. It is your life.

Many times we insist
on having all the best things because that’s the only way we can ensure “quality of life” for ourselves. I can neglect myself in every other way, but if I have the best watch or pocketbook or car or square footage, I get to tell myself I’m the best and how much I deserve to have even more of the best.

What I know for sure: Having the best
things
is no substitute for having the best
life.
When you can let go of the desire to acquire, you know you are really on your way.

I never thought I’d hear
myself say this, but I’ve grown to enjoy lifting weights. I relish the sense of strength and discipline that comes when the muscles are forced to resist. Better still, lifting weights has taught me something about life.

I’ve tried varying schedules—lifting every day, every other day, two days on and a day off. The everyday approach was the least effective; constant lifting begins to break down the muscle tissue. The same is true with mind and spirit. Without giving yourself a chance to reenergize, you begin to break down all the connective fibers of your life.

Keeping it all straight is stressful. You need to give yourself moments to rest. I once told my assistant just because I have ten free minutes on my calendar doesn’t mean I want to fill them. “Let’s practice what my philosophy preaches,” I said. That meant breathing space had to become part of my daily routine.

So I began scheduling little moments of calm—moments in which I do nothing for at least ten minutes. Sometimes I just rub my dog’s belly, or play a little fetch. Or I take a stroll, or just sit still at my desk. It works wonders. Whenever I give myself these little breaks, I find I have more energy, and I’m in a better mood for all the business that comes afterward.

I know for sure that a little restoration goes a long way. I don’t carry even a twinge of guilt about giving myself that time. I’m refilling my tank so that when the next phase begins, I’ll be fired up and ready for whatever is to come. Fully restored.

I always thought I knew
why exercise was essential—to not have a fat tush—but I didn’t get the
real
reason until a visit to Johannesburg in 2005. I was visiting the Leadership Academy for Girls, the school I was building at the time, and knew there were many things on my agenda. I was jet-lagged when I arrived, so at 7 o’clock the next morning, I chose not to get up and work out. Instead, I stayed in bed an extra hour to catch up on rest. That was my excuse the first day. By the third day, it was about the treadmill. I didn’t like it—not enough cushion support for my knees. After three days of not exercising, my resolve to stay fit dissipates. It’s easier to lie to myself:
I’m too tired, too busy, there’s not enough time
are all part of the downward spiral.

Unfortunately for me, the resolve to work out is directly tied to the resolve to eat healthfully—if one slips, so does the other.

The food at the hotel was not to my liking, so I made a special request for something anyone can make: mashed potatoes. The chefs had no problem whipping some up. And so I ate mashed potatoes and bread every night for the duration of my stay, which was ten days. Ten days of high-glycemic foods combined with no working out equals ten extra pounds for me.

Even worse than the weight gain was the way I felt. Exhausted. Lethargic. I suddenly had aches and strains I didn’t know existed.

Aha! I finally got it: When you nurture and support your body, it reciprocates. The basis of that support is exercise, like it or not. The most essential benefit is more energy; weight control is a bonus. I know for sure that taking care of your body, no matter what, is an investment, and the return is priceless.

Among the many things
I learned from Eckhart Tolle’s
A New Earth
was this: I am not my body. After studying Tolle’s ideas closely, I felt far more connected to consciousness, or soul, or inner spirit—whatever you choose to name the formless being that is the essence of who we are. I thought of all the years I’d wasted, hating myself fat and wanting myself thin; feeling guilty about every croissant, then giving up carbs, then fasting, then dieting, then worrying when I
wasn’t
dieting, then eating everything I wanted until the next diet (on Monday or after the holidays or the next big event). All that wasted time, abhorring the thought of trying on clothes, wondering what was going to fit, what number the scale would say. All that energy I could have spent loving what is.

Who I am, who you are … I know for sure we’re not our bodies or the image we hold of them. But because what you give your attention to looms larger—in this case, literally—all my focus on weight actually made me fatter. I can look at a picture from any period of my life, and the first thing that comes to mind is not the event or experience, but my weight and size, because that is how I’ve viewed (and judged) myself—through the prism of numbers. Such wasted time.

I’ve given up scale-watching—no longer will I let a number determine how I see myself and whether I’m worthy of a good day. It was an awakening to recognize how shallow and small that made me. You’re not your body, and for sure you’re not your body image.

I try not to waste time
—because I don’t want to waste myself. I’m working on not letting people with dark energy consume any of my minutes on this earth. I’ve learned that the hard way, after giving up hours of myself and my time, which are synonymous when you think about it. I’ve learned from my experiences of getting sucked into other people’s ego dysfunction that their darkness robs you of your own light—the light you need to be for yourself and for others. What I know for sure is that how you spend your time defines who you are. And I want to shine my light for good.

Yes, I freely admit it:
I have too many shoes. I also have too many jeans, and a designer bonanza of black skirts, size 8 to elastic. Plus tank tops and T-shirts and sweaters. In other words, I have issues with having too much stuff. I’m starting to ask myself this question: Do my things promote joy, beauty, and usefulness, or are they just burdensome?

I’ve decided to keep only that which delights me or enhances my well-being. Organizational expert Peter Walsh says in his book
Enough Already!
that our homes are “overwhelmed with stuff and [our] lives littered with the empty promises that the stuff didn’t fulfill.… In buying what we want, we hope to acquire the life we desire.… [But] chasing the life you want by accumulating more stuff is a dead-end street.”

This I know: More things don’t make you feel more alive. Yet feeling more alive is part of fulfilling your true self. It’s the reason we’re all here.

Material excess is about so much more than the physical objects themselves. Although we know we need to let things go, doing so causes anxiety. Yet I know that letting go leaves space for more to come. That’s true of our relationship not just to shoes but to all things. Cleaning house—both literally and metaphorically—is a great way to hit the Refresh button.

There are all kinds of ways to declutter your life—and they have nothing to do with just donating shoes.

Say good riddance to decisions that don’t support self-care, self-value, and self-worth.

Ask yourself if the people in your life give you energy and encourage your personal growth, or block that growth with dysfunctional dynamics and outdated scripts. If they don’t support you as a loving, open, free, and spontaneous being, good-bye!

Put a stop to the stagnant patterns that no longer serve you.

At work, reduce not only the “clutter” of inefficiency, but also strive to create a balanced workload and make your work invigorating, inspiring, collaborative, and empowering to others.

I want to be lean and clean for the future, dust off my wings. I know for sure that doing so will make it easier to fly. Enough already with the stuff that doesn’t enhance who we really are. That’s the real deal of decluttering, a process that’s ever evolving as you move closer to the self you were meant to be.

And saying good-bye to too many shoes is a darn good start.

Power

“When you know better, you do better.”

—Maya Angelou

Whenever I hear
Paul Simon’s song “Born at the Right Time,” I think he must be singing about me. I came into the world in 1954 in Mississippi—a state with more lynchings than any other in the Union—at a time when being a black man walking down the street minding your business could make you subject to any white person’s accusation or whimsy. A time when having a good job meant working for a “nice” white family that at least didn’t call you nigger to your face. A time when Jim Crow reigned, segregation prevailed, and black teachers, themselves scarcely educated, were forced to use ragged textbooks discarded from white schools.

Yet the same year I was born, a season of change began. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in
Brown vs. Board of Education
that black people had the right to equal education. The ruling created hope that life could be better for black folks everywhere.

I have always believed free will is a birthright, part of the universe’s design for us. And I know that every soul yearns to be free. In 1997, while I was preparing to play Sethe in the movie
Beloved,
I arranged a trip along a portion of the Underground Railroad. I wanted to connect with what it felt like to be a slave wandering through the woods, making my way north to a life beyond slavery—a life where being free, at its most basic level, meant not having a master telling you what to do. But when I was blindfolded, taken into the woods, and left alone to contemplate which direction led to the next “safe house,” I understood for the first time that freedom isn’t about not having a master. Freedom is about having a choice.

In the film, Sethe explains what it was like to make the trek to freedom: “Looked like I loved [my children] more after we got here,” she says. “Or maybe I knew as long as we were in Kentucky … they really weren’t mine to love.… Sometimes I hear my boys, hear ’em laughing a laugh I ain’t never heard. First I get scared, scared somebody might hear ’em and get mad. Then I remember that if they laugh that hard till it hurt, that be the only hurt they have all day.” She also says, “I’d wake up in the mornin’ and decide for myself what to do with the day,” as if thinking:
Imagine, me decide.

During shooting, I said those lines over and over, feeling the force they carried. In the years since, Sethe’s words have remained with me—I rejoice in them daily. Sometimes they’re my very first thought before I get out of bed. I can wake up in the morning and decide for myself what to do with the day—
Imagine, me decide.
What a gift that is.

What I know for sure is that we all need to cherish that gift—to revel in it rather than take it for granted. After the hundreds of stories I’ve heard of atrocities around the globe, I know that if you’re a woman born in the United States, you’re one of the luckiest women in the world. Take your good fortune and lift your life to its highest calling. Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.

I’ve always been
a homebody. I know that might be hard to believe, given my full schedule, but I usually head home right after work, finish dinner before 7:00, and climb into bed by 9:30. Even on weekends, home is my all-time favorite hangout. Since I’ve spent most of my adult life in the public eye, it’s important for me to carve out a private space. A refuge. A safe house.

Years ago, Goldie Hawn told me she’d created her own safe haven by declaring her home a gossip-free zone. As part of her work for Words Can Heal, a national campaign to eliminate verbal violence, she and her family pledged to replace words that belittle and do damage with those that encourage and rebuild. Her choice to use language that uplifts is in line with a truth Maya Angelou once passed on to me: “I’m convinced that the negative has power—and if you allow it to perch in your house, in your mind, in your life, it can take you over,” she said. “Those negative words climb into the woodwork, into the furniture, and the next thing you know, they’re on your skin. A negative statement is poison.”