Friday Reflection: Losses Reshape us for Gains

 

Weekly Show Reflection:

It is always surprising when you get a group of unsuspecting guests together and their life stories, their deepest passions, seem so disconnected from one another, but in reality, they represent just how tethered humans are. How similar the human experience is.

Once in a while, when I have guests who have similar interests, maybe it’s health and fitness or emotional well-being, I’ll run those shows in the same week. But generally, I air the episodes in the order I do the interviews and I wait, just like all of you, for Friday’s episode to come to see where the common denominator is between guests. To discover the common threads that binds these stories together.

Looking back over this past week, I am welling with emotion over the discoveries I’ve made. It doesn’t help that this morning when flipping through Facebook I saw a post from a woman who runs a group titled “I Hate Heroin” who informed her group that both of her sons had passed away the night before, both from heroin overdoses. And, it doesn’t help that an old friend, the kind you don’t see often but with whom you never skip a beat, posted that she realized this morning upon waking that it had been exactly thirty days since she’d last spoken to her father before he passed away. Max was one of those special, loving men who was a seriously cool cat. He was always ready with an anecdote and some humor. He was warm and unconditional, giving and dependable. He will be a legend in their family, he was just that kind of guy. I found myself in a dark room with Olive nuzzled under my chin crying for these strong women. I was overcome with the weight of their loss.

So it is with this heart-heavy perspective that I sat down to analyze our guests this week. And, at first glance, other than living their passion, a man who lost his son to gang violence, a man who has the number one singing program on YouTube, a woman who loves travel, and a mastermind guru don’t seem to have much in common. But they do. And, what I found goes much deeper than summarizing their passion in only a few words, much deeper than the fact that they are the type of people who are brave enough to live their passion.

The thread between this week’s guests is loss. They have gained, but in order to do so, they have first had to experience loss. For Monday’s guest Azim Khamisa it came in the form of murder, for Tuesday’s guest Aaron Anastasi it was in losing one’s self, for Wednesday’s guest Kylie Travers, it was brought about by domestic violence, and for Thursday’s Aaron Walker, it was in taking the life of another.

On Monday, Azim Khamisa gave us a devastating account of how his engaged, college-student son, Tyriq, lost his life in a senselessness gang initiation. He explained to us how his passion for teaching people how to forgive began. Azim, once an international investment banker, and now an author and speaker, dragged himself through his darkest days, and for the past twenty years has not only been running a non-profit organization in his son’s name to prevent kids from killing kids, he has joined forces with the grandfather of his son’s murderer to do so. He has even gone as far as to forgive the young boy, now man, who took his son’s life. And with that, they have plans for him to join the organization and the speaking duo when – or if – he is released from prison. At fourteen-years-old, he was given a 25 years to life-sentence.

Azim says in this interview that his greatest challenge was helping people to see that “there were victims on both sides of the gun.” An idea that he says was given to him by a higher power when his body went into shock at the news of his son’s passing. Azim experienced tremendous loss but with it came a passion that has since revealed his life purpose. He speaks to hundreds of thousands of children about violence. He has authored four books.