Happy Sunday Everyone:
I’m up 8lbs in 5 days….was it worth it? YES!! Now need to go the other way and quick.
I had a very interesting thing happen on Wednesday night that has caused me to think a lot. What started out as something incredibly annoying and frustrating has shifted to a great exercise for me. We had 22 people over Wednesday night, composed of family and dear old friends who have since moved away. One of the men, now in his 70’s, starts telling my boys what a crappy football player I was in high school. “ I hope you’re faster than your dad, he had to be the slowest kid on the field, if he was playing at all”….there was more than that but hopefully you get the point. I’m not sure how you feel as you read but as I was standing there I was thinking “what a jackass”. I chose to not defend myself/abilities (or lack thereof), but I was pissed. Here is this guy, in my house, telling my kids what a crappy athlete I was…who does that? My ego/pride of course wanted to argue his points but I let it go (kind of). I’m comfortable enough in my skin these days to recognize I’ve had a couple of wins in my life since my glory days as a Mustang but I’ll fully admit, it didn’t feel good. We learn from our life experiences, positive and negative, I learned from this. We have choices to make based on what we learn. After digesting the experience, and although I understand it’s a cliché of sorts and something talked about often, I thought about the question of how I want to be remembered (not related to football, but life)? And for me, although I’ve listened to people ask the question, and answer, I’ve never purposefully thought about how I wanted to be remembered until I experienced this stupid event on Wednesday night. So here it goes, “I want to be remembered for bringing massive joy to people’s lives and to have those people know that I cared about them a ton”. If that’s what people are saying at my funeral, I’m good. In reality though that’s like a mission statement….question I need to ask myself in my day to day life is “what am I doing to bring massive joy to people’s lives, and having them understand how much I care about them?” vs. just saying it as some pie in the sky statement to be forgotten tomorrow. If I’m thinking about this, and I have it written down, and I’ve shared it with Kim and my boys, and now all of you, I have a much greater chance of doing what I say, and I have people holding me accountable if I’m not. If this sounds ridiculously altruistic please know Kim has already had to ask me how I could write something like this and go off regarding a messy garage inside of the same 24 hours:) But I honestly got back on track quicker just thinking about it.
I do understand this is bigger picture stuff but what’s more important? I wish you guys could be in my head from what happened Wednesday night, to know how I got here, I’m actually glad this whole thing happened. In a nut shell it’s a lot easier for me to understand what I want by also understanding what I don’t, and I’m 100% certain I don’t want to be the guy sucking the life out of others vs. building them up, all the time. The other very simple message is be less sarcastic, and make sure your joy or pleasure is not coming at the expense of others.
I would ask you to consider what you want to be said when you’re gone, and if the life you live today is truly in alignment with your thoughts.