Excerpted from Every Moment Matters: Savoring the Stuff of Life

Foreword by Mehmet Oz, MD

As a surgeon and scientist, it has been my life’s calling to become a student of the human heart and all the nuances, emotions, and physical structures that make this organ the most important of all human hardware, the very sustainer of life. From the moment your heart starts beating (just twenty-one days after you were conceived) to the moment you take your last breath (about seventy-seven years later, give or take), your heart has given you the greatest gift imaginable: life. And all without you ever giving it a single conscious command to pump oxygen-rich blood through your circulatory system. It keeps you alive because it feeds itself first.

This book is also about feeding yourself first. John St. Augustine is a friend, mentor, and formidable voice in the world who has a gift. He sees things most of us miss, the sacred spaces that are hidden in the ordinary events of life and the lessons contained in those events that make life more vibrant and worth living. John invites us to share spaces from his journey—one forged from his relentless quest to squeeze as much out of being alive as possible, be it climbing to a mountaintop in Colorado or walking a thousand miles in search of his higher self or donating a kidney to save his daughter’s life. He sees our existence as not just a life of work, but rather a work of art and invites us to create a canvas that reflects the short time we have on Earth as one of awareness, service, joy, and giving—all tempered with a measured dose of urgency, for tomorrow is promised to no one.

From this moment on, you can alter your life for the better in so many different ways—by changing your diet, doing regular exercise, and having a positive outlook on the world you inhabit. All those things and more can help keep you from having to see someone like me with a mask on my face and scalpel in hand. Prevention is always the best prescription. It’s often not until we are faced with nature’s wake-up call disguised as a “life threatening” illness that we begin to become fully alive and smell the roses that have been there all along—just out of reach as we fill our lives with things that seem to have great meaning at the time but little meaning in the long run. I know better than most that someday even the miraculous heart ceases its offerings, and in that moment, life ends. You can begin now to give your heart perhaps the most important thing it needs—a reason to keep beating—and it starts by knowing that Every Moment Matters.

Mehmet C. Oz, MD, host of The Dr. Oz Show,
Author of the YOU! health book series