"Right now? You came in here to wake me up in the middle of the night?—"
"It's only 10:15," she inserts.
"To show me a Tik-Tok video that I could just as easily watch in the morning?"
Lucy swipes her thumb across the screen. “If you learn something before you go to bed, your subconscious will ruminate on it while you sleep. If you watch it just before you go to work, it’ll be forgotten in the menial tasks of your day.”
Lucy, at a mere seventeen years old, recites more proclamations about life than a full-time preacher. I have no idea where she gets it all.
She taps the screen and cuddles up to me on the futon.
A very handsome man appears on the screen. He's in his early to mid-twenties, from the looks of it. Already, the video loses serious credibility. What does this hunky specimen know about life that I don't? I've lived twice the years he has.
"If there was one thing you could tell your younger self," the attractive man says, "what would it be?”
The image pans out to a woman sitting across from him. She’s probably my mom's age. With interest, I glance at the subject title printed along the top:An Interview with My Grandmother.
The woman smiles fondly and tips her head back. "I would tell myself so many things…" she starts. In the quiet pause, the look in the woman's warm brown eyes grows distant. It's a look that says she’s made a lot of mistakes. But her posture, combined with the softness of her tone and the slight Mona Lisa smile at her lips, suggests she's forgiven herself too.
“I could list three or four things of equal value off the top of my head, but there's one thing that outshines them all. It’s two simple words:Say yes."
The camera pans back to the young man. "Say yes to what? To Grandpa when he asked you to marry him the first three times?"
"Well, that’s another story, dear.” The woman chuckles. “Former First Lady Nancy Reagan once supplied the country’s youth with an antidrug campaign:Just say no.Where drugs—or anything addictive is concerned— that is most excellent advice.I'mreferring to life-altering opportunities. Opportunities that will—if you let them—pass you by."
Something inside me stirs with interest and intrigue, awakening a part of my past that has haunted me over the years. Something that haunts me still today.
"I used to see it as procrastination,” she continues. “I called myself a horrible procrastinator for missing opportunities when they came along. For not seizing the day, as they say. It took years to admit that it wasn't procrastination at all.”
Before she can elaborate, my mind produces a word. I dismiss it and narrow my gaze on the screen in anticipation.There’s no way she’s going to say what came to my mind.
“It was fear.”
Whoa, that was weird. So I guess shewasgoing to say it.
“Fear is the monster that held me back. Fear is the phony friend who said I shouldn’t jump at the chance to do something. Who said I should sit back, wait, and see if the opportunity is still available in a few days, better yet, a week. If it was, I should surely go for it then.”
The woman shakes her head absently. “But even if the opportunity lingered beyond the week, even when something stirred inside me, urging me to see what lay beyond, fear would speak up again.‘One more week,’it would assure me. ‘If it's still there in one more week, you'll take it.’But the fact is, I had no real intention of seizing those opportunities.”
"But," the young man says, “eventually, you changed."
The woman nods. “Eventually, I changed. I took a chance, and that’s when my motto was born. Of course, I had to be brave enough to seize the opportunity before anyone else could. I said yes, and a world of possibilities unfolded before me. It was scary, and it wasn't easy by any means, but oh, how it was worth it."
Lucy points to the corner of the screen that reveals the woman's name.
My eyes bulge. "That's Vanessa Kaylee?" Vanessa Kaylee's fashion line is world-renowned.
Lucy nods.
"A lot of people don't know this about you, Grandma,” the young man says, “but you didn't even start the business until you were in your 40s."
"Right. And for those of you about to make an excuse because your older, consider this: Colonel Harland Sanders opened his first fried chicken restaurant when he was sixty-two years old."
"Exactly,” the man replies, “and I, for one, am very glad he said yes to that venture. For you viewers, I have to tell you that my grandma is the one who inspired me to start this page when I was just nineteen years old."
I glance at the sidebar along the screen to see that over five million people have liked the video. The kid must have a great following, and it would take a lot more than a handsome face to make that happen.
"And you didn't even tell your viewers that you were my grandson for the first year and a half,” the woman adds.
