Keep still long enough to see yourself.

I looked into the mirror today. Not the passing glance I give while rushing through the morning, but a long, soulful stare that made me stop. Here we are, at the start of a new phase of the life story. If we are lucky, five more decades. If not, one day. Either way, I want everything.

I love ideas. I heard someone say recently that certain people are drawn to ideas the way birds are drawn to open sky, and all I could do was nod. I live for them. Every single one matters to me. Critique one of mine and I will return with a better version. I have learned to gravitate toward the people willing to tell me an idea is trash, because I live for the bad idea turned good. Really good. All because someone loved me enough to name its flaws.

For more than a decade, I have been nursing an idea about marketplaces. This year, in Flint, Michigan, the ache intensified. There it was: a market for the people and by the people, a two-minute walk from the school of public health. I had to see it for myself. I had to stand inside it and remember that a sustainable marketplace for health is not an illusion. It is a reality, and Flint is leading the way.

I tried once to lead the way myself. In 2015, I wrote a grant for a sustainable marketplace for health in Nigeria. The idea failed. I have never stopped rewriting it in my head. So today I am doing what yesterday taught me: I am writing it down. This is the daily practice. You look. You listen. You write the thing down. You begin again.

Soon, and very soon, there will be a sustainable marketplace for health in St. Louis. It will bridge African creatives and a global audience. Many will come out of curiosity and stay for love. We will call it something good, because anything that gathers people is good. We will use it to activate wellness, creativity, family, relationships, and joy. The joy of being alive and well among people who cherish people.

The idea is bold, outrageous, maybe impossible. Then again, there is me. I expect to fail; we failed the first version. I expect many to say it will not work. I expect to have no idea how to sell it or win anyone over. All I have is the idea: good health and wellbeing for a community in St. Louis and beyond, with an African flair.

Algorithm, help me find the ones who believe this idea, a daily practice for beginning again, is worth spreading, and let us bring it to fruition. I expect it to take time. Storms will come. Still, I expect to make a strong attempt, to wait for days, months, years, to be rejected along the way, and to experience what can only be called the grandeur of life.

Behold how an idea opens. As experience. As invitation.

If you want to practice this art of living for yourself, one still look in the mirror, one idea written down, one small beginning at a time, start where I start every morning. Keep One Day is free. It walks you through a single day of keeping what matters, so that beginning again becomes a daily practice and not an accident.

Keep this.