There's one particular piece of music I like to run to. It's called "Spybreak" by Propeller Head, and you can find it on The Matrix soundtrack. It's fast and energizing, and I seem to never tire of it.

At the beginning of the piece, there's a heavy bass intro, and then a spoken phrase. By 2005, I'd been listening to this piece of music for probably at least a couple of years. After all that listening, I still didn't know what they were saying in that spoken phrase. For a while, I'd rewind and listen to it over and over, but when I just couldn't get it, I gave up. It didn't matter if I knew what they said, I still found the music energizing, and that's what I really wanted, anyway. I take this song with me everywhere on my iPod as part of my running playlist.

So, on Thanksgiving weekend of 2005, I flew to Montana to be with my sister and my dad. One morning, I went over to the clubhouse at my sister's complex to workout. I ran three miles and did a bit of ab work. While I'm cooling off, I'm standing under the television, drinking a cup of cold water. My third, I think. On CNN, they're telling the story of a woman who received a liver transplant from someone whom had apparently passed away. At the very end of the story, they talked about the donor, who he was, and what had happened to explain his liver being donated to the woman in the story. They talked with the donor's fiancé. On the screen flashed the picture of a young man, a man in uniform. A man on the police force, it seemed. I imagined that he had been gunned down, that this would be a story like so many stories I'd heard before. But that wasn't it.

This young man had gone on a mountain biking trip. The cause of death? He drank too much water. I looked at the other woman working out with me in the small gym.

"No way," I said. I looked at the cup of water in my hand. I put it down.

I'd heard of over hydration, but mostly in the context of running races, and I thought it mostly meant that you had to stop running and go pee a lot, thereby ruining your time. I didn't know you could DIE from it!

The woman in the gym with me said that she'd heard that college kids had died because of binge drinking. WATER.

Are you kidding me?? Water, the elixir of life, the main component of our bodily existence, could be consumed to the point of excess? To the point of death?

Apparently, yes. This young man had suffered a potassium imbalance from which his brain could not recover, and he expired. It made me think. How could you not know that you were drinking so much water that it would kill you? Wouldn't it be uncomfortable? Somehow, I realized, this upstanding and friendly young man had become used to drinking large quantities of water. In fact, he had probably convinced himself that because he lived in a dry climate, drinking a lot of water was necessary for survival. He'd heard the whole eight-glasses-of-water-a-day rule, and had decided that the eight-glass rule applied to normal circumstances.

But his life was far from normal, wasn't it? He was a mountain biker. He lived in a dry climate. He'd heard that the body needs water way before you feel the sensation of thirst. His wife-to-be may have reminded him that he couldn't count on the sensation of thirst to guide his water drinking habits. Perhaps she'd reminded him of the horrible accounts they'd read together of mountain bikers who had experienced dehydration and become horribly ill or passed away. Maybe he had acclimated himself to drinking quantities of water that were far in excess of what his body needed, even for the strenuous conditions of mountain biking in a dry climate.

I wondered if drinking that much water had become uncomfortable for him, if he drank water even when he felt hydrated, simply because he'd been trained to think that he couldn't trust his own body, or that he couldn't trust his own interpretations of the sensations he felt. If he was alive today, would he curse me for being an assumptive fool? Or would he nod and say, "I knew myself not."

I began to see the parallels in my own life. There were definitely things I was tolerating in my life, rather than rejoicing. There were behaviors I was engaging in that certainly required a lot of conditioning, but that conditioning was generally negative rather than positive. I was gearing myself up every day for a race that I didn't feel like running anymore, but couldn't figure out how to quit the team. In some ways, I was just like the over-hydrated liver donor-except that I hadn't died yet.

Would I know -- would I really know -- when I'd run out of time to stop what I was doing, and change my life? When would I give myself permission to do something new?

I left the gym, crossed the snow-covered and freezing parking lot in my running shorts, and ran up the stairs to the third floor, where I entered a quiet apartment, my sister and her boyfriend having run out to do some errands.

I still had the earpieces to my iPod inserted in my ears, and as I was preparing, yes, a glass of ice water and some breakfast, my favorite running song began to play in my ears. As I danced alone in my sister's kitchen, relaxed and on vacation, the spoken phrase that always plays at the beginning of that song finally and clearly rang in my head.

"Make your move now."

I continued dancing for a few seconds, because it took me that long to realize that I'd actually heard the words. I said, "Did that just say, "make your move now"?!" I grabbed the iPod out of its holster and rewound the last minute of music. And there it was again, unmistakably:

"Make your move now."

Almost exactly a year later, I had left my job, had launched a new and exciting career, and was residing for half the year in a different state with the man of my dreams. I had figured out how to stop bingeing on the toxic waters of my life. What will it take for you to wake up? Has the realm of possibility already whispered in your ear, and you've ignored it? Is the universe screaming in your ear, and you are singing very loudly in order to drown it out?

Take just one step toward what belongs to you, the future of your dreams.

Make your move now!