Gina Greenlee Quotes

Follow your heart. Then root its longing with the facts.

~ Gina Greenlee

No moment is too small to claim. Strung together, moments fashion a life.

~ Gina Greenlee

Showing up begins long before you stand at the start. Prove yourself an exception in a world where people talk more than act. Intent without follow-through is hollow. Disappoint yourself enough times and empty is how you feel. Make yourself proud. Fill yourself up. Show up.

~ Gina Greenlee

Taking risks to create the life you want is an act of trust. It means believing in your ability to create a new reality while you are in the process of creating it.

~ Gina Greenlee

As your training integrates Mind, Body and Spirit, enjoy the process. Your journey to the marathon finish will last a few hours. Your journey to the start will influence a lifetime.

~ Gina Greenlee

Advice of all kinds from experienced marathoners can sweep you away. Your training, reading and racing will expand your network and everyone has a story – the best shoes, clothes, energy foods. Don’t second-guess yourself or your process. Be friendly, act on advice that feels right for you and leave the rest.

~ Gina Greenlee

Risk: no full life occurs without it.

~ Gina Greenlee

Practice makes comfort. Expand your experiences regularlyso every stretch won’t feel like your first.

~ Gina Greenlee

Mistakes help to sharpen your next steps. They don’t prove that you shouldn’t try again.

~ Gina Greenlee

Each of us has our definition of adventure: ending an unsatisfyingrelationship, returning to school, parachute jumping or training for amarathon. Go ahead. Get your thrill on.

~ Gina Greenlee

Stand up for yourself by not standing yourself up.

~ Gina Greenlee

We can talk about it, dream about it and dissect the fine print.In the end, only action satisfies our longing.

~ Gina Greenlee

To believe that we can have what we want is an act of trust – not only of others but also, ourselves.

~ Gina Greenlee

If companionship is a mandate for all of our experiences, then we will miss out on many of life’s blessings.

~ Gina Greenlee

The study book for life’s tests is the whole of our experience. Though we mayfeel unprepared, tests appear only when we are truly ready to ace them.

~ Gina Greenlee

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to do somethingyou’ve never done before? There’s only one way to find out.

~ Gina Greenlee

What do you resist examining up close?How can you ground yourself so you feel safe enough to try?

~ Gina Greenlee

The notion of the perfect time is more than myth. It's the ultimate self-delusion.

~ Gina Greenlee

Feeling lonely? Wish you had a special someone to help fill the void? Reconsider your definition of romance, reconnect to your passions and be swept away.

~ Gina Greenlee

Cultivate the art of maximizing serendipitous opportunities.

~ Gina Greenlee

It's tempting to believe that a break from life's routine will only cause chaos. But regimen does not ensure security. The only constant we can count on is change.

~ Gina Greenlee

Forgive someone today. Especially if that someone is you.

~ Gina Greenlee

One of the best kinds of thrill is defining, honoring, and achieving our goals.

~ Gina Greenlee

The best way to teach is how you live your life.

~ Gina Greenlee

To commune with your heart and soul, be willing to go out of your mind.

~ Gina Greenlee

Much of our lives consists of a series of choices over which we have absolute control.

~ Gina Greenlee

Until that rainy Sunday at the movies 31 years ago, for me, companionship had been a mandate for life’s good times. After Orca, it became a choice. My trip to the theater helped me to distinguish between loneliness (experienced by default), and solitude (choosing when and how to enjoy my own company), as I began a journey of engaging the world on my own terms. Over the years, that journey deepened as I traveled life’s roads with increasing independence and confidence, whether I was attending graduate school at night while working during the day, buying my first house or changing careers.

~ Gina Greenlee

Because travel was an area of my life where I felt most vital, I wanted to continue to invest in that, too. I had quit a full time job, drained my retirement account to invest in a long-held dream, and used the realization of that dream to enter a void with no guarantees. I didn’t want financial struggle to be the sole outgrowth of the risks I had taken. More than money, I had put my belief systems on the line.

~ Gina Greenlee

No matter. I was single, no children, a handful of plants and at 39, young enough to regroup. If I hit ground before I finished building my wings, I would not take anyone with me.

~ Gina Greenlee

I knew I could always earn money from a job. What I didn’t know was could I extend the dream of writing beyond my trip?

~ Gina Greenlee

Putting the dream in motion involved significant personal downsizing, moving three times to trim housing expenses and continuing to freelance. I sold one piece to The New York Times Magazine, many more to The Courant, and another to The St. Petersburg Times.

~ Gina Greenlee

Ten years ago I wondered, “How does one travel around the world? How does one step out of a well-established life to follow the dream?” I’ve answered those questions. But now new ones emerge.

~ Gina Greenlee

In the aftermath of the attacks on the United States – that included chaotic overall of airline security – and the exploding tensions in Nepal, friends thought it ill-advised for me to board a flight to Kathmandu. Yet my existence at home felt so tenuous and unpredictable that political unrest in Asia barely registered. Also, it seemed more important than ever for me to keep going, not only overseas but also in the direction of a more satisfying life. Somehow the two felt connected.

~ Gina Greenlee

The trip changed all that. Stirring the murk of a life ill-fitting, Something More was perceptible though without name or form. Something More was the genesis of a map, not one handed to me but rendered with each step taken, a skill seasoned by a cruise gone bad.

~ Gina Greenlee

In 2006 I had begun the discernment process for locating my rightful geographic home. By the time my corporate pink slip arrived I had spent two years researching and taking recon trips to five different cities in southern California. Having crossed them off my list, in February 2008 I visited Sarasota, Florida, at the urging of a friend who winters in a neighboring town. Though Florida had never been on my radar, only minutes in Sarasota I knew I’d found home.

~ Gina Greenlee

The cruise was the conduit for what would become my third book. While I was traveling and writing for ctnow.com, women across the United States and from the Caribbean emailed not to ask about my geographic journey but my existential one. “How do you find the courage to travel on your own?” they wondered. “How do you keep from getting lonely? Don’t you feel self-conscious eating out alone?” After the first 30 emails like these I thought, There’s a book here. It would be eight years before I published Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road. But the inspiration for publication came during the cruise.

~ Gina Greenlee

My post-cruise sabbatical would spark the idea for my first book, Cheaper Than Therapy: How to Keep Life’s Small Problems from Becoming Big Ones – The Lesson of the Paper Clips. How? In my data entry job all I did for 20 hours a week was paper clip printouts of computer screens. For three years. I loved it.

~ Gina Greenlee

Wandering is not limited to geography. Also an altered state of consciousness, it allows a disembodied self to drift on currents of collective awareness with minimal attachment to the physical world. This state of wander tapped imaginative faculties that opened me to a freedom of being only previously experienced through travel.

~ Gina Greenlee

During those days of whirling about the globe, I had an epiphany: travel was the only area of my life where I had no expectations. I anticipated nothing while fully engaging each moment. What bred adventure, surprise and deep experience was not knowing, surrendering to now and letting go of control.

~ Gina Greenlee

Then I’d go home, return to a pattern of worry, unable to tap the surrender core to travel’s inspiration. What was different?

~ Gina Greenlee