Last weekend I made the trip to Charlottesville, Virginia for a short reunion with my college roommates. In honor of turning 40 (some of us sooner than others), we rented a house next to Monticello, drank wine, sat in the sun (they have that in Virginia) and shared in each others' lives. 

The advent of social media makes keeping up with people easier than it once was. I've seen pictures of their families, they've seen me dressed as Dolly Parton, and we all have a general idea of what is going on with one another.

This is from a film camera. Google it. Also there are things in my hair...like curls and stuff. 

But actually spending time with them was almost like going back in time. 

I guess it's the magic of friends who have known you for a lifetime that you can sit down at a kitchen table in Virginia and feel so easily transported to the conversations from our time at Gannon University, where we all met. 

Sure the selections on the table are different. We've graduated from box wine and five dollar vodka to a finer vintage - wine that requires a cork screw to open. Conversations shift from struggles with professors to struggles with life - but the ease with which we spoke to one another remained the same. 

And I was more present in the 48 hours we spent together than I've been to any one moment in months. 

I spend almost every waking moment doing what author Daniel Goleman calls “nexting.” I might take a few minutes to enjoy a Friday night, but by Saturday morning I am planning a blog, worrying about how much I haven’t written, and plagued by a constant, vague notion that I need to be doing more.

More. 

Make more money, write more blogs, take on more clients, run more, workout more. 

Always so much guilt that I need to do more. 

Last weekend, for 48 hours, I gave up more. I didn’t ask myself to write or study on the plane. I looked out the window and watched the sunrise, I talked with a grandmother traveling to Iowa, and opened my laptop only twice - once to order a pizza.

We look pretty good if I do say so myself. 

I listened to music, I hugged my friends tightly and felt the bonds of our friendship. Sunday night we watched "The Birdcage," and I hung on every word as though I hadn't watched the movie 100 times in college.

I turned my phone off.

Like, off. 

Not on silent, not on Do Not Disturb. 

Off.  

The quote on the board in our gym last week came from a client: “There is not Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, there is only now.”

The greatest gift from my friends last week was enjoying the now. We mindfully spent time with one another because it had been 14 years since we were all in the same room together. The sacredness of being in one another's presence allowed me to lean into the moment in a way I rarely experience these days.

My goal, more so today than ever, is to remain mindful. And that is my wish for you. To not be dulled by the daily routine, but comforted by it. To find a way to enjoy and embrace the now and lean in to the sacredness of the moment. 

Our only guarantee is now. 

Reach for it. Touch it. 

It’s ok.

That’s your permission slip for the day. That’s your golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Your tiny piece of paper that says you have permission to do what you need to do to take care of yourself today.

Sometimes it’s ok to take a break. 

It’s ok to break down.

It’s ok.

I can’t think of anything more powerful in terms of permission than those two words. So I’m using them carefully and thoughtfully and with as much meaning as I can pour into them this morning.  

It's ok.

You spend so much of your time taking care of everyone else. People at work, spouses and children and parents at home. Friends and family and people in your church. 

Today I’m giving you the permission slip that says it’s ok to take care of you. 

I see so many fitness posts about rising and grinding, and that’s ok if that’s what works for you. 

But I don’t really want my days to be filled with long arduous tasks that I endure. My dad lost his job in the steel mills when I was a kid and spent the rest of his working days as a corrections officer in a maximum security prison. He did enough enduring of his days for the both of us. 

Life is too short to constantly rise and grind. 

Yes sometimes you have to push yourself through a workout, but the only thing I want to grind in the morning is my coffee beans. 

I would argue that when workouts and life and long runs begin to feel like they are a grind - when work and relationships and life begins to feel that hard, day in and day out, then it might be time to take a break.

Take inventory today, right now. What do you need right now? What do you need today? How will you take care of yourself today? Sure we all probably need more sleep and a vacation and more sunny days like yesterday. We have some degree of control over the sleep, but often very little over vacations and the weather.

What do you have control over?

Maybe you need to take a day off from the gym and walk outside. Maybe you need to get back in to the gym because you know you feel better when you show up. Maybe you need to eat lunch away from your desk. Make yourself a priority.

I don’t know what you need today. But whatever that need might be, here’s your permission slip.

It’s ok. 

Ok?

Good talk. :)

By the age of 10, my belief in Santa was waning. I still believed, but my 13 year older brother was, by then, a non-believer and pointing out the flaws in the existence of the man. Most notably, he pointed out that our chimney ended in a wood stove that was constantly in use.

"He can't come through the flames," he said. "And....he's too fat."

Skeptical though I was, I nonetheless sat on Santa’s lap at the annual Ebensburg Moose Christmas party and parlayed my request to ol’ Saint Nick.

"I’d like a Pete Rose baseball card,” I said.

In the mid-1980’s Pete Rose was everything to me. Despite living in Western Pennsylvania and carrying a healthy allegiance to my home town Pittsburgh Pirates, it was Pete who was on my Wheaties' box and the poster on my wall.

It was Pete I pretended to be when we played backyard baseball.

In the days before my parents had cable television, I don't recall any fanfare when Pete passed Ty Cobb to become baseball’s All-Time Hit’s Leader. I knew because I read it on a Wheaties' box. And it was on the Pete Rose poster I sent in box tops to acquire.

Pete Rose was more than the all-time hits leader when I was a kid growing up in the 80’s. He was the definition of the way you played the game. When you slid into home, you did a Pete Rose slide, which meant sacrificing your body to take out the catcher on the way into home plate.

His nickname was Charlie Hustle. If you watch clips of Pete playing baseball, he was not the graceful athlete that Derek Jeter was or Mike Trout is. He lumbered when he ran, and hunched and poked out hits at the plate, offering more of a chop than the beautiful swing of a Ken Griffey Jr. He was an average looking guy who hustled and worked his way to being a super star.

And so that’s what my Dad taught me to do.

When Pete was at the plate, he watched the ball into the catcher’s mitt on every pitch.

Dad said I should do that too.

So it should have come as no surprise that all I wanted for Christmas when I was 10 years old was a Pete Rose baseball card.

When asked if I wanted anything else, anything at all, I said no. There was honestly nothing I could think of more than to add Pete Rose to my healthy and growing baseball card collection. I had Ricky Henderson and Roger Clemens and some guy named Cal Ripken Jr.

I’m sure the request turned my parents sideways. Sports card shops had not yet blown up in our part of the country. In a few years you could walk into a store and pick out a Pete Rose rookie card or something else from his early years. But not in rural Western Pennsylvania in the mid 1980’s.

So my parents did what they could do.

On Christmas morning, I woke up and shuffled through the presents under the tree. There were several packs of baseball cards - Topps and Donruss - and I ripped through them all - finding Nolan Ryan and Andy Van Slyke and other stars that I admired.

But there was no Pete Rose.

My dad called a friend whose son collected baseball cards to see if he fulfill my wish, and was assured that there was a card to be had for me.

I eventually did get myself a Pete Rose baseball card to go with the thousands of other cards that sit at my parents' house.

Of course as you read this, you probably wonder why Pete Rose. These days he's almost kryptonite to the game of baseball, setting up his yearly protest in Cooperstown during the Hall of Fame inductions. And admittedly, he was the first hero to fall for me, when he was banned from baseball permanently for betting on his own team while managing the Reds.

As I re-read this post, it sounds kind of sad, but I don't remember it that way. I think very fondly about the year I wanted that one simple thing because of what it represented. Pete Rose symbolized the most important thing in my little 10 year old world.

Baseball.

As I've gotten older, and life has gotten more complicated, I take great pleasure in having memories of Christmases past that I can look at with such fondness, even if the memories are likely tinted with rose colored glasses.

How lucky I am to have memories so dear.

Wishing you and all of those in your life a very happy holiday.