Happy Sunday Everyone:
I attended a funeral yesterday for a friend’s mom, I then drove to a wedding reception immediately following for another friend’s mom. Gloria passed away at the age of 90, Kim was married at the age of 78. I was driving to the office earlier in the week listening to something when I heard the guy say, “focus on problems and you’ll have more of them, focus on gratitude and you’ll have more of it”. I had a crazy busy week; I’ll skip the resume of events, but it was busy. I found myself being somewhat of a business martyr to Kim, explaining how busy and how stressed out I was, all that’s on my very important plate and trying to balance it all. Then yesterday comes, sitting in that small Methodist church listening to Gloria’s Family eulogize her incredible life. I can’t explain it, and won’t really try, but the love of her family, her grandkids, her kids, and her husband, was pure love.
Kim and I split up, she went to the wedding ceremony while I was at the funeral, and we’d meet back at the reception after. The 15-minute drive by myself to the reception, I couldn’t help but to think of “focus on problems, you’ll have more of them, focus on gratitude, you’ll have more of it”. You can replace those words with other important thoughts/words, and it still works. I replaced it with “perspective”, focus on perspective and you’ll have more of it. Perspective for me was Gloria’s life and her families’ words of her life vs. my busy schedule and finding myself acting like various things are more important than they are, including me acting more important than I am. Like my problems are bigger than other people’s problems? Like I’m more stressed than other people because I’m busier. My better version of me is whispering to my weaker version of me “keep it in perspective buddy, you’re not that big of a deal, your problems aren’t bigger than others”. More important, they’re not real problems anyway.
I get to the wedding reception of 150 people and the first people to greet me are the bride and groom. They could have been 21, full wedding gown, beautiful, pure joy. I missed the vows, but Kim (my wife) said it was incredible. To hear my friend toast his mom and all she’d been through and where she was today was beautiful. Get busy living or get busy dying came to mind. She did almost die a few years ago, which is what prompted her to do this. She thought we could have a blowout celebration of life when she was gone, or she could marry her long-time boyfriend and have a blowout wedding while we’re all here together. She chose the latter and we’re all glad for it.
I’ve already decided on a very boring, but useful word for 2025, realizing now it’s more business focused than anything else, the word is granularity. I’m choosing another word for 2025, more all-encompassing for my life, that word is “focus”. What will happen if I spend time focusing on focusing on what is important (yes that was meant to read weird)? What will happen if I focus on keeping things in perspective? If I focus on the gratitude of my many blessings and opportunities. If I focus on the relationships in my life that matter the most (by keeping perspective). There is a peace that comes from this thought process and I’m enjoying it. Now I need to focus on making it stick!