As we get older, life, it seems, becomes increasingly filled with commitments and responsibilities. Most days I find myself running from one task to the next: eating lunch in my car as I frantically run errands over my lunch break, squeezing in phone calls to family and friends during my ten minute drive to work, and agonizing over work assignments and deadlines while I sleep. My car is my virtual office, my Facebook page is my only connection to my loved ones and I tend to think of life in key strokes, wishing I could CTRL + Z (undo) my error in judgement the other night when I added too much detergent to the laundry and found myself swimming in a sea of bubbles. Sometimes it feels like my mind and body never truly rest. And I’m not even 30.
Former CEO of Coca Cola Enterprises, Brian G. Dyson, describes it best, “Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, friends and spirit – and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.”
So how can we all do a better job of maintaining balance in our lives? Here are a five simple rules I try to live by:
Decide what’s most important in your life and don’t take those things for granted.
Learn the beauty and the power of the word “no.”
Respect your time; don’t waste it on things that don’t matter to you.
Do your best and learn to accept when that’s just not enough.
Some simple numbers to show the possibilities when giving up isn’t an option, and neither is dreaming small dreams.
30,000+: Number of Monthly Visits
Five: Number of Daily blogs written
200: jeffnoelmidlife You Tubes uploaded, in past 8 months
Hundreds of thousands of Monthly Page Views
First: Google Page display for all five blogs
Last: Where I want to be (humble, least, meek)
Raising enough money to find a cure for an incurable disease.
Impossible is nothing.
Thank you for your visits. There are enormous plans for Mid Life Celebration. This is just the beginning. Together, we can and will help shape the world in a way that teaches young children personal responsibility, beginning in elementary schools.
Mid Life Dreams. We all have them. We all like them. We all want them to come true.
This is probably where we take a wrong turn. Somewhere. Somehow. It happens.
But we are completely unaware. For a long time. A really long time. Maybe a couple decades.
We somehow miss the turn, get lost, and then end up at the proverbial midlife crisis.
It’s a ton of work to overcome decades of status quo.
It’s a ton of work to start a business. It’s a ton of work to get healthy and stay healthy. It’s a ton of work to save enough for retirement. It’s a ton of work to have a peaceful and contented spirit.
Everything is a ton of work.
It’s very similar to the early pioneers. This is the follow up video to the one from a few weeks ago. It was the burning sunset that prompted me to stop.
Unscripted and one-take, the way You Tube videos are traditionally done.
Harvard Business Review simply says this, in reference to the proverbial mid life crisis:
“A growing number of researchers are defining middle age more broadly and in positive terms, as a good time to reassess life goals and chart a new course.”
“Midlife is your best and last chance to become the real you,” declared an article on the topic last year in the Harvard Business Review, which drew thousands of emails in response, says co-author Carlo Strenger, an associate professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University in Israel and a researcher and consultant on midlife change.”
It’s simple.
We go through life and most of us mess it up. We get a second chance.
Midlife heartbreak or midlife opportunity. Pretty simple. Two choices. You get to pick one.
If you and your spouse (and yes, want to acknowledge some readers will not be parents), worked hard all your life and played by the rules, and you gave birth to a child without eyes and never able to walk, which would you pick?
Mid Life heartache or mid life opportunity?
Well, there was a Family that had to make this choice. They were featured on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as well as numerous other media pieces, including a heartwarming You Tube Video feature, about 6 minutes long, available at the end of this post.
One of my “secrets” to unspeakable joy is the daily effort to read, listen, watch, experience, think, do and reflect on the countless blessings that surround my ordinary life.
You have all these blessings too. But in order to feel the Peace and Contentment that are the fruit of these blessings, you must become fully aware.
You must become willing to invest time everyday. Even if it’s only six minutes. Will today be another day to postpone your new beginning?
Hardly. I was 21. A senior in college, and a dreamer.
There was a movie that shaped the mid life celebration vision. A mother was videotaping herself while she spoke to her unborn child.
She was dying of cancer and would never meet her child.
She wanted her child to be able to see and hear, directly from the video tapes, what she wished for her child and what she thought her child might want to know about their mother.
It was in the following days, on the lazy, sunny, fall days in West Chester, Pennsylvania that I dreamt of writing a book for my children.
The book would contain all the secrets of life, learned through books, travels and experiences.
While the Mid Life Celebration website is two years old, the name and vision are the same, what’s morphed is Mid Life Celebration’s purpose.
And it’s more exciting than I could have ever imagined 30 years ago. Ever feel like that?
Do you have important dreams from long ago that are more exciting today than when you first dreamt them?
How did you go about keeping them alive all these years? Or, how did you go about reigniting the flames?
Have you ever done something you weren’t supposed to do? And in order to do it, you had to do it in a sneaky way? And often, there was a close friend who had already done the thing, and they helped you?
Smoking, drinking, stealing, bad pranks, and so on.
Seriously, these are things adults do not make a conscious effort to teach children. Can you imagine a Mother saying, “Come here son, it’s time you learned how to smoke cigarettes.”
Heard a Chantix commercial last night. Chantix helps smokers quit. Let me set the scene:
Mom comes on saying, “I smoked a pack a day for 25 years. I could not quit smoking, no matter how hard I tried.”
Until one day……
“I told my son to promise me he would never start smoking.”
He said, “Promise me you’ll quit.”
And the Cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon. Little boy blue and the man in the moon……he turned out just like me…..my boy was just like me….
