Today I watched a little boy sitting cross-legged at the edge of the ocean, trying to consume an ice-cream sandwich before the waves did.

I haven’t written a blog in exactly six months.  These past months have been anything but uneventful, yet I could not find the spirit to write.

Another very close friend passed away in March.  She had been fighting for five years and she did such a good job at it that she had all of us fooled into believing that she would beat her disease.  I recently remember that after her only child was born, she told me that dying young would be OK as long as she made it until her daughter turned twenty-one.  Karen died a month shy of that goal.

Her death rattled me for I had just lost one of the few people who knew me in my entirety.  Karen and I worked hard and played hard in the early days of my career.  She stayed close while we were in London and gave me the confidence to start a new career in network marketing.  It was she who made sure that I never lost touch with our professional friends.  Most of all, she always took an interest in our children and stayed in touch with my parents.

In the months that followed I became quiet, at least in my heart.  It was here that I found the woman I had been for most of my life, the one I knew best before the chaos of the past few years began.   In this quiet place I’ve been able to enjoy my children and my husband anew, to rediscover old hobbies and to find a new purpose for taking my businesses forward.

When a friend asked me two weeks ago to please start writing again, I listened, but I still didn’t know where to start.

I watched that little boy on the beach as he calmly took the last bite of his ice cream.  Within seconds, a wave blew across his shoulders and over the hand that had just held his ice cream.

The chaos of the ocean wasn’t the important thing.  It was the sweet pleasure of that ice cream.   He may never remember these five minutes of his young life but I will never forget.