'O's Little Guide to Starting Over', The Editors of O, The Oprah Magazine

Rating: 5/10

Overall Thoughts

A compilation of inspirational short essays.  Perfect quick read for those who are breaking free, rising above and making their way forward.  This book doesn't actually provide guidelines or tips on starting over, rather the writers share their personal struggles and experience on starting back at square one. 

Just like the saying goes, "when one door closes another opens", this book serves as a reminder that what may feel like the end is often just the beginning.  Change is a challenge, but it can also be freeing and healing. 

Favourites From 'O's Little Guide to Starting Over'

Letting Go

• Check in with yourself: Does your life feel meaningful and on-purpose at this moment?  If the answer is yes, your energy is invested in living your best life.  But to the extent that you feel misery, your energy is asking to be reinvested.  Misery literally means "the feeling of being a miser."  If you're miserable, stop hoarding your life energy.  Make a choice, any choice.  If you're still miserable, you can choose again.  Eventually, you'll see that all misery is simply life asking you to trade your current course of action - or inaction - for something purposeful and true.  

Lost and Found

• With change, there is grief for what has been lost, but also opportunity - and the choice of how to see it.  Choose wonderful.  
• The primary difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that the successful people fail more.  If you see failure as a monster stalking you, or one that has already ruined your life, take another look.  That monster can become a benevolent teacher, opening your mind to successes you cannot now imagine.  
• The reality is, we are bound to fail.  By refusing to accept this, we only make things worse.  Conversely, if we own our failure openly, publicly, with genuine regret but absolutely no shame, we reap a harvest of forgiveness, trust, respect, and connection - the things we thought we'd get by succeeding.  

A New Day

• You write down each and every stressful thought, and then ask yourself four questions about it: (1) Is it true? (2) Can I absolutely know it's true? (3) How do I react when I believe this thought? (4) Who would I be without the thought?
• All the pain in the world is not going to take happiness and peace away from you.  If anybody can make you angry, you are the loser.  If anyone can steal your happiness, peace, away from you, you are the loser. 

Matters of the Heart

• Death is the ultimate destination, no matter which way I steer.  And I want to live my days worth dying for.  

Ends and Beginnings 

• Unexpected gifts are given when the heart stays open.  
• If you go out there knowing you're going to rock it, you will.  But if you go out there afraid you'll get hurt, you will.  
• However awful the storm of my disappointment, it's a response that belongs to me.  It's my heart, after all.  My territory, my kingdom.  And since I'm the only one with the authority to surrender it, I can also take it back.  The retraction is painful, of course, but it comes in handy when yearning for the wrong someone.  
• I have always held on so tight: to the loss, to the lover, to the love.  But now I saw that grasping - even of dearly held beliefs - causes us and others needless pain.  Everything is constantly flowing and changing.  Nothing and no one lasts.  The best gift we can give ourselves and those we love is to let them be part of the nature of things: the raging river, the growing child, the dying light.