(WGHP) — For years, Dara Kurtz was living a life most people would love to be living.
She was happily married with two healthy kids and a fulfilling job as a financial advisor. But at some point, she sensed there was even more to life. As things do for so many families, life got to a speed that hindered her family’s ability to spend the quality time together she wanted. And then, a life-changing event showed up: a diagnosis that she had breast cancer.
“I lost my mom to melanoma, a form of skin cancer, and it was terrifying,” Dara says. “So, I had that in the back of my mind the whole time I was going through chemo and surgery and radiation. I was on the table, they were doing the biopsy, and I was just sobbing, saying, ‘This can’t be happening, my kids can’t – I know how hard it is to live in the world without you mom,’ and my daughters and they were 11 and 14.”
That’s when she left the financial advising job and began to write. It turned into a few books and her blog she calls, Crazy Perfect Life. She understands no one’s life is perfect – yes, she’s still very happily married and her kids are (now) grown and still healthy but life is much better now she argues because her focus is on being much more aware of all she has.
“Having a daily gratitude practice is taking the time to open your eyes and notice the blessings in your life,” Dara says. “That doesn’t mean that you don’t have challenges, that doesn’t mean that you like everything about what you’re currently facing – absolutely not – but it does mean that you are going to take the time to acknowledge, notice, give thanks for that which you do recognize and what happens is it sort of builds momentum.”
That may seem easier when you have financial security and those other things we mentioned – the happy marriage and healthy, successful kids. But being grateful, Dara points out, is free.
“Every single one of us, every single day, has a choice about what we want from day and how we want to feel. We don’t have to be perfect,” she says.
When it’s pointed out to her that we all know some people who simply choose to be miserable, she replies:
“We do and it is a choice and some definitely – even if they subconsciously don’t see it, they’re making that choice not to help themselves,” Dara says. “At the end of the day, people have to decide for themselves, I want to do the work, I want to try to lean on some tools to help myself feel the way I want to feel and it’s not going to happen overnight, it’s going to take hard work and commitment. At the end of the day, if someone isn’t feeling the way they want to feel, they have to intentionally decide that they want to help themselves and until someone decides they don’t like the way they feel and they want to help themselves, it’s hard – it’s hard to help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.”
See more from Dara in this edition of The Buckley Report.
Source: Fox 8 News Channel