Remember when we were kids, and the only time was Now? We didn’t fixate on what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow (unless tomorrow happened to be Christmas).

When I was young, I lived moment to moment — playing and running and cartwheeling with friends, absorbing the azure color of the sky, tasting the smells of the seasons. Every moment was a sensory picnic.

But somehow, as the years passed, I moved out of my body and into my head. And left to its own devices, my head would rather time-travel to anywhere but the present. It’s either frantically reliving yesterday or anxiously pre-living tomorrow – two insidious red shoes that look practical on the surface but hurt like hell when you wear them too long.

Somehow I learned to believe that if I worried hard enough about what might happen tomorrow or Tuesday or in 10 years that I could somehow prevent it from happening. Brené Brown says we’re trying to “dress rehearse tragedy so we can beat vulnerability to the punch.”

She is spot on. I have dress rehearsed thousands of imaginary tragedies that I never got to star in. Meanwhile, my poor body got to experience a constant cocktail of stress chemicals courtesy of worry and anxiety.

Living in yesterday isn’t any less harmful. Sure, it’s important to have a rear view mirror.  But if you drive using only your rear view mirror, you miss what’s in front of you and crash.

Intellectually, we know that it doesn’t matter how many times we visit our past, we can’t change it. We can only learn from the experience. Yet we keep churning and re-analyzing. What if I did this? Or what if I did that?  Maybe I looked at it wrong.  Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe it was worse.

And before you know it, a day or a decade has gone by and you lost that, too.

There are several tools that help me out of these red shoes and bring me to the present. One is mindfulness – just trying to be exquisitely aware of where I am, what I’m seeing and hearing, the feel of the chair supporting my back or the cat purring in my lap. That forces me to be present and back in my body, even if for a moment.

Another tool is releasing or surrendering. When we realize our “power” to control past events is nil and our “power” to control or influence future situations is minimal at best, that’s when it’s time to resign as General Manager of the Universe, and let whatever you believe in take over. It requires a whole lot of faith, but yields a whole lot of relief.

And when I’m present, in both my head and my body, that’s when I feel powerful joy and true peace.

It has taken two years to get up the courage to start a blog, which, even as I write it, sounds incredibly silly – like saying it’s taken two years to work up the courage to try cotton candy.

But, as someone acutely sensitive to other peoples’ approval and disapproval most of my life, this was a huge leap. A huge step toward vulnerability.

My inner critics have done their best to completely throw me off track, with anxiety (what if people think I’m unintelligent, weak, a horrible writer, a loser), harsh judgment (what makes you think you have something worthwhile to say?) and downright fear (what if you fail at the only thing you’ve ever felt good at?)

Who these voices are and where they come from is the topic for a whole other blog. But suffice it to say, I’ve spent a lifetime running from them. And as the saying goes, wherever I go, there I am, and there they are, too.

So, this is my line in the sand.

I’ve spent the last 35 or so years dissatisfied with who I was – one aspect or another – and trying to find this ephemeral better version of myself. In my quest, I’ve read over 500 books from Anne Lamott to Zig Ziglar. Some were useless, some gave me incredible insights, and a few actually changed my life.

But I didn’t find Debbie.

I didn’t find her in a relationship, at a particular weight, in a career or in hobbies – all things  I thought at one point would be the finish line to happiness.

And finally, after all these years, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to find myself, I needed to free myself. And that’s what this is all about.

This is a blog about The Ruby Slippers and The Red Shoes.

The Ruby Slippers are the ultimate expression of our Highest Self – that part of us that is courageous and wise and visionary and able to manifest whatever we desire, named for the “magical” shoes bestowed upon Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

Most of us know the story: Dorothy traversed the dangerous and bumpy brick road, desperate to get what she most wanted (back home). She tried neurotic friends, The All-Powerful Man, even murder (well, involuntary manslaughter when she dumped water on the Wicked Witch). But in the end, Dorothy never needed any of those things: She had the power all along by clicking her heels together three times and visualizing what she wanted.

On the other hand, the Red Shoes represent the ultimate expression of our ego – that small-self part of us that tells us we are empty unless we obtain, achieve, or covet something. That manifests itself in dissatisfaction, cravings, addictions and never-enoughness.

The Red Shoes are named for the malevolent footwear from Hans Christian Andersen’s eponymous fairy tale, in which a peasant girl named Karen is no longer content with her well-worn red shoes and yearns for a pair cut of the finest silk. As the sad story goes, she gets the shoes, but they begin to control her, compelling her to dance day and night until she is forced to cut off her feet with the shoes on them.

The red shoes are symbolic of our vehicle to escape to anything we’re running away from, like a difficult boss, a stressful home life, grief, sadness, anxiety, whatever. Your escape could be work, alcohol, drugs, anger, shopping, or any number of things. These things may bring momentary peace, but done to addictive levels they also bring pain — and a lot of it.

This is about my search for my Ruby Slippers — my Highest Self — and the hard lessons I’ve learned about keeping the worst of the “red shoes” at bay. I’m far from perfect, although I tried so hard to be, doggedly believing that the road map to happiness and away from pain led outward rather than inward. It is this commonly held belief that keeps people buying, striving, seeking, drinking, drugging, whatever — and at the end of the day still feeling empty and asking no one in particular, “Is this all there is?”

But there is so much more. So much more. And it’s a magnificent journey.