Sunday Story...Family Ties

Sunday Story…Family Ties

I spent this past weekend visiting my family. We all have family. Some families are big and expansive, others are smaller and more compact. We generally don’t get to pick our family. They are the ones we come with, even the ones we marry into. I suppose mine is average if such a thing is possible.

The reason I am writing about this today is the juxtaposition between birth and death, the beginning and the end, alpha and omega. I have a grandson just 6 months into his life and my father at 80 slowly nearing the end of his.

One happy and joyful being passed from relative to relative, played with and playing, rolling over and discovering a whole new world.

The other, well, hardly moving or speaking.

2 journeys…beginning and ending and beginning again. Most of us can’t remember our first 3 or 4 years. My father can’t really remember these last few years either. He will be gone at some time in the near future. My grandson has been born at a time when his life span is expected to exceed 100 years to parents that are already concerned about his nutritional intake.

My father was the first of his family to graduate from college. It was quite an accomplishment and one that set me on the path to a college education as it has my children and now my grandchild. As a matter of fact he already has a college fund.

My father’s journey has been long and in many ways tiring. He and my mother raised 4 boys and have generously given to all of us and all of their grandchildren. Now they are great grandchildren to cherish.

My family is not close geographically. We come together infrequently and enjoy the time we have. My parents raised their children to be independent and able to enjoy lives we built. We were very fortunate to have been born at the time we were born and to the people who raised us. I hope my children and grandchildren have the same good fortune. I hope my father realizes the fantastic job he and my mother did in providing the life they did for me and my brothers. And I hope our newest member gets all of that and more.

I feel sad in seeing my father in the sunset of his life but I hold dear of the memories of strength, integrity, and perseverance he provided. I feel happy in my grandson’s prospect and hope to give him the same example my father gave me.

This shifting of time, this beginning and ending of times is all part of the process we all experience. It is one of the things that all of us humans get to do in some way or another.

Enjoy the process on both ends and in the middle. Life is about what happens in the dash…the dash between your date of birth and date of death.

Namaste

John

“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”

www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...Nice Guys

Don’t always finish last. We live in a world where being tough is held up as the ultimate virtue. After all big boys and girls don’t cry. Keep a stiff upper lip. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. These are platitudes we have all heard all of our lives. The CrossFit community has even more of them…raise the bar or die trying, misery loves company so same time and place tomorrow, the weight isn’t too much, you’re too weak, suck it up buttercup. We seem to think that being tough will get us through just about anything.

And tough will serve you often. Picking yourself after you get knocked down is an important quality. Understanding that failure is not defeat, but just an unexpected outcome is a good lesson to integrate. It is important to attack some things like a dog with a bone, not giving up until you get the outcome you desire.

But do you have to be tough all the time? Aren’t there things you could do with a little more love, a little more “nice”? Can’t you be nice when you are getting your morning latte? Can’t you be even nicer than you were yesterday? Do you really need to go through life with your shields up and your hyper-vigilant game face on? I don’t think so. Not everything is a battle for supremacy. Every errand does not need to be a personal record or a contest to see if you can be more efficient, faster, better than the last time.

Maybe you should relax a little and love more. Maybe if you were nicer people would help you. After all, don’t we all want to help people who give us a reason to help them? And isn’t someone being nice a really good reason to help them? Do you really want to go out of your way for the people you know who are rude, crabby, grouchy, or just generally unhappy? I think not.

Try a little more love and little less effort, a little more yield and less push, a little more water and less stone in your day to day life and dealing with other humans. Give people a reason to help you. Be nicer. And then when it is time to be a badass, be a badass. Because being hard and unyielding all the time is hard hard work. Learn to be a little nicer and it will go a long way and then when it is time to be not nice it will be much more effective and more noticeable.

Be hard when the time is right. Be nice the rest of the time. Yin and Yang, hard and soft, one defines the other. You can’t have one without the other to define and highlight the other.

Be a bad ass but be a nice bad ass!

Namaste

John

“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”

www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story…Pity Party

Serves no one. Well, that isn’t really true. If you decide to host a pity party and a bunch of people show up I guess you might feel well met…after all misery does love company. But does it really serve you? Are you going to feel better when everyone goes home and you are left wallowing in your own swampy morass of pity? Do you really want everyone to coo and cluck over your horrible situation and how you have every right to feel the way you do and you have been so wronged and of course you are justified in feeling this way?

When I was teaching a P.E. fun day recently at a local elementary school I saw this in action a number of times. A child would fall down (incurring no real damage) and would proceed to cry and carry on until some energy from fellow classmates or teachers got focused on them. In a couple of instances they sat in their misery (alone) for 20 minutes until the game shifted to something more to their liking. This really served no one at all.

Where is your pity party? Are you constantly grousing about your weight? How it is so hard for you to lose weight? How you have tried every diet known to man and just nothing works? You’ve been to Doctors, looked at surgery, tried the pills, the shakes, the calorie counting, the shots the prescriptions but nothing give you the permanent change you want? Why isn’t there a magic pill that will work for me….blah blah blah, whine, and whine whine until we are all sick of it?
Maybe your thing is getting fit? Or maybe your job or career? Or your relationship. Hell, maybe your pity party is the weather. It’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s allergy season, it’s too dry, and it’s too humid, blah blah ad infinitum.

Look we all feel sorry for ourselves from time to time. And sometimes the wrongs done to us would have us be justified in feeling that way. But the real question is whether or not curling up into a fetal position is still serving you all these years later? Are you going to lay on the floor and cry about how horrible things were (and maybe they really were and any one with half a brain would agree that you should be curled up in a corner sucking yor thumb) until when? Is that fetal position still serving you? How, exactly, is your continued pity party serving you?

Maybe you should try happiness? Maybe you should try getting out of bed in the morning with a smile on your face and decide it’s a great day and then set out to make it one? After all you can always crawl back into your pity cave if happiness doesn’t work.

The fact is very simple…the pity party and the happiness train can’t exist at the same time. It’s a one or the other sort of proposition. So get off the pity party circuit and try an express to happiness. Shake it off and get out to building the amazing life you deserve.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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Sunday Story...Time is on my Side

Or is it? Remember when you were little? Christmas or your birthday seemed to take forever to come around and summer vacation never came soon enough. Through the years time seems to shrink. It is June already and the year is half gone.
It seems like it was just yesterday that I turned 50 and now I am closer to 60. When did that happen? Let alone the distance from childhood. There is no avoiding the onslaught, the continuous march of time; it is going to happen no matter what I do.

Every morning each of us is gifted with 24 hours. Our year is going to have 365 and a quarter days unless it gets cut short. I get the same amount of time you get. How I spend that time is up to me. When we are young time seems infinite. There appears to be no end of time, no end of the possibilities. The older I get the closer time seems to be. It feels like there is a limited amount of it to get things done and if I don’t get them started and finished soon there will be no time left.

So do we rush out in a frenzy, trying to pack our bucket list into the next few years? You know the bucket list? The list of 100 things you must do before you die…learn French (or Spanish or Russian), go to Machu Pichu, run with the bulls of Pamplona, travel around the world in 80 days or whatever else may be on your list. After all time is running out!

I find myself paring the list down to the essentials. Living a life by design, simple and full. A life designed intentionally to inspire and be full of the things that matter to me. Do I want to do all of those things on the list? Sure, it would be nice but it is much more important to me to live a life of optimum health and fitness, to inspire others by example and have some fun and connection while I do that.

Get out and do the things that move and inspire you. A young friend of mine is pursuing her dream of being a mid-wife, a doula, and she has been doing it in the villages of Kenya and Latin America. She often says I inspired her to get out of our small town and find a world where she could make a difference. And she is doing just that…making a difference. She is, in her early twenties, already leaving a legacy of lives touched and changed by her presence.

It is never too late to get started. You are not too old or too young, too big or too small to get out and make a difference. But time is working against you. And time is working for you. You get so many minutes in this body, in this lifetime.. The time is now to go do the things you were meant to do, the things you were designed to do, the purpose you were placed here to fulfill. Maybe you already know what that is; maybe you are in the midst of getting it done. Bravo! If not, today is a good day to get started.

Remember:
If you think you are too small to make a difference, try going to sleep with a mosquito in the room.
It is up to you to leave your mark; no one can do it for you. Time is moving on and the world is waiting for you to step into your role.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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