Pam Grout - Living Big: Embrace Your Passion and Leap into an Extraordinary Life

To read Living Big is a delight, and to put its principles into practice is downright thrilling.

VICTORIA MORAN, author of Lit from Within and Creating a Charmed Life

With this inspiring book, Pam Grout blows the lid off your limited thinking and invites you to become extraordinary. Turn off the TV, she advises, reclaim your personal power, and start spinning miracles.

GAIL MCMEEKIN, M.S.W., author of The Power of Positive Choices and The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women

A brilliant, enticing guide to a life of adventure and purpose. Let Pam Grout escort, enthrall and, yes, nudge you, into creating a life you thought you could only dream of.

FATHER PAUL KEENAN, author of Stages of the Soul and Heartstorming

If you long to live a life of passion and purpose but wonder where to begin, stop right now and read Pam Grout's wonderful and dynamic book Living Big. Pam writes from the bone and speaks from her heart. She knows what it means to find and then follow your joy. Take Pam on your journey and embrace what really matters.

LESLIE LEVINE, author of Ice Cream for Breakfast: If You Follow All the Rules, You Miss Half the Fun

This edition first published in 2015 by Conari Press, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

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San Francisco, CA 94107

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Copyright 2001 by Pam Grout

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Originally published in 2001 by Conari Press, ISBN: 978-1-57324-703-0.

Cover design by Jim Warner

Interior design and composition by Nancy Campana, Campana Design

Author photo by Ron Dewitt

ISBN: 978-1-57324-652-1

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

Printed in the United States of America

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This one's for Ronnie.

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO BE LITTLE.

Disraeli

Sign your name here if you're ready for a life of enchantment, mystery, wonder, and passion:

_____________________________________________________________

You(yoo) 1: The person whose name is signed on this line 2: Immense 3: Vast 4: Endless 5: Colossal 6: Enormous 7: Boundless 8: Astronomical 9: Tremendous 10: Infinite 11: Mammoth 12: Mastodonic 13: Gigantic 14: Gargantuan 15: Herculean 16: Humongous 17: Prodigious 18: Stupendous 19: Cosmic 20: Whopping 21: Thunderous 22: Larger than life

EVERY DAY, YOU ARE SIGNALED AND SUMMONED TO EMBARK ON A JOURNEY BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF ALL YOU HAVE EVER KNOWN. YOU NEED ONLY RELINQUISH YOUR FEARS, OPEN YOUR HEART AND BEGIN.

Bob Savino, As the Spirit Moves

The average human being squanders his imagination, hoards her love, and has no clue about the depths that exist within his own soul.

Or, as the great poet Ranier Maria Rilke put it, Most people come to know only one corner of their room, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.

Living Big is about discovering the rest of your room.

We all know the pitiful statistic about our brainpower: that we use a scant 10 percent of what's available. What's worse is we use even less of our love, acknowledge only a fraction of our feelings, and cower in the face of our highest dreams.

If you ask me, the reason five out of ten people in this country hate their jobs and 17 million are clinically depressed is that they're leading lives that are way beneath them. They're exhausting themselves on meaningless things.

Scientists estimate the average human being has 60,000 thoughts a day. A pretty impressive statistic until you hear this one: All but 2 percent of those 60,000 thoughts are the same ones you had yesterday.

Just think what we could do if we used that other 98 percent to think up new ideas, to dive into life's mysteries, to solve the problems that face our world? Mist of us waste our 60,000 thoughts on trivial, insignificant, thoroughly meaningless things. Look at the cover of a typical woman's magazine:

Lose 5 Pounds by Christmas

101 Ways to Regain Your Energy

Drive Your Lover Wild in Bed

Don't we have anything better to read about? If the 7 million readers of Ladies' Home Journal would all wonder instead, What can I do to improve my own soul? or, How could I make our schools more loving? the big problems we're so afraid of would be solved in a year. Seven million people focusing on issues like that would be an unstoppable force.

But instead we focus on absurd trivialities. We live at half-throttle. We suit up for hopscotch when we could be performing miracles. We're completely oblivious to our own majesty, to the fact that the very heartbeat of the Divine thrums through our veins. Instead of greeting each day with our holy gifts, we pound on the snooze button, desperate for fifteen more minutes. Therein lies the source of all our problems.

Living Big is a book about hooking into the other 90 percent of our brains, loving with every ounce of our souls, stepping up to claim our wildest dreams.

I used to think a big life meant getting on The Late Show with David Letterman. I used to worry I'd never find anything to inspire producers to call directory assistance for my number. I knew good and well I'd never be an actor, the odds of me making the Olympics were about 285 million to 1, and my pets, despite my insistent coaching, could never seem to master any stupid pet tricks.

And then I realized that many of the people on the talk show circuit, while certainly glamorous, are probably not any bigger than the Great and Terrible Oz once you actually peek behind the curtain. Yes, some of the TV actors we idolize are living big lives, but many of them are just as small and scared as the rest of us. And on the same token, there are hundreds of people whose names you've never heard of who are living giant, Titanic-sized lives.

So among other things, Living Big is a book of stories. It's about ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things. It's about visionaries, dreamers, people who discarded the cushy and glamorous for a more meaningful vision. People who are on a crusade.

Some of the people in this book are out to save the worldto clean up polluted oceans, to preserve ancient cultures, to administer CPR to antiquated political systems. Others long to introduce adventure and spirit to a society that has practically forgotten how to smile. Still others just want to have peace. But no matter what the mission, no matter what the vision, the people in this book all know that life is to be cherished, that No is never the right answer, and that one person can make a difference. Or at least an awfully big dent.

And while Living Big may appear to be a book about heroes, about other people, it's also a book about you. About what's possible within you.

The people in this book haven't done anything you can't do. It's important to remember that. These people who live big simply took their gifts and put them to use. It is my hope that their inspiration will be the foundation for your own Big Life. That their passion will inspire you to find your own purpose, your own mission in life.