EP 6: WHAT I LEARNED AT A BON JOVI CONCERT

What can a Bon Jovi concert teach you about life, love, getting older, gratitude, and loyalty?

More than 30 years after I first discovered Bon Jovi as a nine-year-old girl, I finally got to see them live at Wembley Stadium — and somewhere between singing along with tens of thousands of people and finally hearing Always live, I found myself thinking about much more than music. In this rather raw and personal episode of Stillness of Heart, I share five unexpected realizations I took home from that night: what it feels like to suddenly realize that neither our childhood idols nor we ourselves are 16 anymore; whether the kind of dramatic, all-consuming love we grew up romanticizing is something we should actually aspire to; how the songs we repeatedly listen to may subconsciously program our ideas about love and relationships; why lowering our expectations can sometimes allow life to surprise us; and what gratitude and loyalty really mean when someone we love or admire can no longer be exactly who they once were. And somewhere in between all of that, I ask myself a rather uncomfortable question: what if I have already had my fair share of that crazy, heart-aching, sad-song-inducing kind of love — and what if it never happens again?

A Bon Jovi concert, an unexpected encounter with the passing of time, and five lessons I definitely didn't expect to bring home from Wembley.