Waiting for Jack

Amazon Product Description. Robin Spizman says: “Refreshingly vulnerable, witty and wise. Waiting for Jack feels like a conversation with your best friend over coffee. With an honest approach and take action message, Kristen Moeller motivates readers to make it happen. This book is a special gift!”

Waiting for Jack is Eat, Pray, Love meets the Success Principles. Its memoir meets “how to.” It’s an inquiry into why we keep waiting for our lives to start, why we look outside ourselves for the answers and why we hide the magnificence that we really are. After so many years of being a seeker and not a finder, I declared an end to the “waiting for Jack.” Through the sharing of intimate and authentic stories (both mine and others), the reader takes the journey to break free from the “self-help treadmill” and to find their own “inner Jack.”

It is the permission we have been waiting for to end the cycle of searching and never finding. It’s an inquiry not an answer—the reader is provided with tools and challenged to find her own unique answers. It is the call to stop “jacking around.” It’s the access to being set free to create our lives and to stop waiting to live.

We are all Waiting for Jack—whatever or whoever “Jack” is. We falsely believe the gifts of life are just around the corner, that anywhere is better than here, that one day we will arrive and everything will be okay. So we don’t try; we give up. We sell out and we forget who we are. We are afraid to succeed, afraid to fail, and afraid to say we are afraid. But as Wayne Gretzky said, “You'll always miss one-hundred percent of the shots you don't take!”

So take the shot, get on the path, and move forward. Authentically give your word to something that matters to you. And remember, you don’t have to wait for Jack.

Review. “Yeah, just sitting around waiting for my life to begin
While it was all just slipping away.
I'm tired of waiting for tomorrow to come
Or that train to come roaring 'round the bend.”

Better Days by Bruce Springsteen

I wish I had a dollar for every time I have put my life on hold waiting for the perfect degree, career, relationship, house, financial investment or even dress. During these times I truly believed that once I had it or done it that I would have “arrived” only to find myself in search of the next “it.” Maybe you’ve done this too.

In Waiting for Jack by Kristen Moeller explains the basis for this waiting game:

[W]hen we wait, we put our life on hold. We become trapped in our impatience and turmoil. We define ourselves by that thing or experience that is supposed to change it all and make it better. We are not present to life, and we lose sight of who we really are.

Paradoxically, we wait and try to get somewhere at the same time – and that somewhere is anywhere but here, in the moment, in the now. We believe when we get there or have that, we will possess eternal happiness. We look for the magic pill. But what if we’ve already swallowed? What if we were born with it? What if we are it?

With stories, confessions, and insights, Moeller seeks to liberate both the reader and herself from this holding pattern. By learning to accept that one has enough (as in material stuff) and is enough (as in the intangible assets such as intelligence or personality), one can learn to live in the present moment.

Waiting for Jack is illustrative book on how to end the quest for “it” and enjoy the journey of life.



Publisher: Morgan James Publishing (April 2, 2010), 150 pages.
Review copy provided courtesy of the publicist.