John St. Augustine - Every Moment Matters: Savoring the Stuff of Life

Living as if your life really matters takes conscious thoughts, words, and deeds. John St. Augustine is one of the few people on the planet who lives consciouslyand gets the most our of his life by extracting the hidden treasures so many of us miss. Every Moment Matters will wake you up, shake you up, and rake you up to the next level of awareness so your burdens become blessings and challenges become cause for celebration.

JEAN CHATZKY
Best-selling author of The Dijfirence
Financial Editor of The Today Show, NBC

What a magical book. Each chapter contains a compelling story that slowly unfolds into a life lesson we can all benefit from. While reading, I laughed and cried and had myself many great moments. It's a gem of a bookone that you'll want to share with those who help you create the most important moments of allthe people who truly matter.

CHERYL RICHARDSON
Best-selling author of The Art of Extreme Self Care
and The Unmistakable Touch of Grace

Every Moment Matters is a cherished gem. John St. Augustine's powerful and uplifting stories lift rhe soul, fill the heart, and expand the mind. A perfect tonic for our radica lly changing rimes.

WILLIAM L. MURTHA
Author of Dying for a Change and
Visionaries for the 21st Century

A close brush with deathor such an experience by a dearly loved onemakes it very clear that each day, all the hoursindeed, every minutein our lives is an unparalleled gift. Yet how to make the most of every one? Now comes rhis very special book by John St. Augustine, giving us a wonderful insight into the breathtaking treasure that is Every Moment. Nothing will put you back in rouch with the wonder of life faster than this book!

NEALE DONALD WAISCH
Best-selling author of Conversations with God

Copyright 2009

by John St. Augustine

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review.

Cover design by Gopa & Ted2 Inc.

Cover photograph Jupiterimages Unlimited

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

www.hrpub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-57174-589-7

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed on acid-free paper in Canada

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To Amanda Lee and Andrew john

For teaching me that every moment matters...

As a surgeon and scientist, it has been my life's calling to become a student of the human heart and all the nuances, emotions, and physical structures that make this organ the most important of all human hardware, the very sustainer of life. From the moment your heart starts beating (just about twenty-one days after you were conceived) to the moment you take your last breath (about seventyseven years later, give or take), your heart has given you the greatest gift imaginable: life. And all without you ever giving it a single conscious command to pump oxygen-rich blood through your circulatory system. It keeps you alive because it feeds itself first.

This book is also about feeding yourself first. John St. Augustine is a friend, mentor, and formidable voice in the world who has a gift. He sees things most of us miss, the sacred spaces that are hidden in the ordinary events of life and the lessons contained in those events that make life more vibrant and worth living. John invites us to share spaces from his journeyone forged from his relentless quest to squeeze as much out of being alive as possible, be it climbing to a mountaintop in Colorado or walking a thousand miles in search of his higher self or donating a kidney to save his daughter's life. He sees our existence as not just a life of work, but rather a work of art and invites us to create a canvas that reflects the short time we have on Earth as one of awareness, service, joy, and givingall tempered with a measured dose of urgency, for tomorrow is promised to no one.

From this moment on, you can alter your life for the better in so many different waysby changing your diet, doing regular exercise, and having a positive outlook on the world you inhabit. All those things and more can help keep you from having to see someone like me with a mask on my face and scalpel in hand. Prevention is always the best prescription. It's often not until we are faced with nature's wake-up call disguised as a life threatening illness that we begin to become fully alive and smell the roses that have been there all alongjust out of reach as we fill our lives with things that seem to have great meaning at the time but little meaning in the long run. I know better than most that someday even the miraculous heart ceases its offerings, and in that moment, life ends. You can begin now to give your heart perhaps the most important thing it needsa reason to keep beatingand it starts by knowing that Every Moment Matters.

MEHMET C. Oz, MD, host of The Dr. Oz Show,
author of the YOU! health book series

It will be many months before you read these words written at 4:44 Eastern Standard Time on a cool and very dark June morning when I just could not sleep. It might have been my sixteen-year-old son and his buddies laughing like the Three Stooges in the basement at one in the morning or the fact that every day is a new adventure when it comes to being the parent of an eighteen-year-old daughter who has discovered that staying out until three-thirty in the morning is a sure way to keep her parents from getting too much sleep. Or it could be that I spent most of my Saturday with about two feet between my nose and the trillions of flowers and weeds that call my northern Michigan backyard home, which no amount of over-the counter anything can help. But, truth be told, it was the graduation party that started all that follows in these pages.

As I sit in the den and look to my right at the table covered with volleyball trophies, framed awards, and a stand-up picture board, it reminds me that eighteen years have passed since my daughter arrived and sixteen years since her brother made his entrance. Nestled behind the diploma and letter of acceptance to college is a stark reminder that Kodak Moments are truly the stuff of life. There is the shot of my daughter just a few days old, curled up on her mother's chest as they both slept on the couch in our first apartment... dick ... she is two years old and surrounded by a mountain of pumpkins for Halloween ... click ... the girl is a star softball player at ten (with her own trading card to prove it) and holds the bat like it's her only time at the plate ... click ... thirteen has come around, and her school picture shows a gaunt face but a fierce intensity in her eyes, as it will be just months before I donate a kidney to save her life ... click ... she stands with three other kids in front of the lake dressed for prom and looking like a model with the words Love Is Forever imprinted on the photo. The images all begin to blend into one ... time passes.

My sight is drawn to more images standing on my roll-top desk. There are Jackie and I more than ten years earlier in a somewhat uncertain embrace as I showed up where she worked, just a few moments removed from the walk I took from Upper Michigan to Chicago and backa journey I had to take to remember who I am, but which strained our relationship far past for better or for worse. The frame next to it holds the image of my father on the day he graduated from high school in 1953. The look in his eyes is one of readiness, as if he were poised to seize the next moment and squeeze it for all it is worth. I was not even a thought in his mind. It has been four years since he passed and more than ten since my mother has been gone, neither of them here to be a part of the family photo taken after today's graduation.