Top ten SPIRIT questions you should have answers to:
1. What is Love?
2. What is more important than Love?
3. What is Hate?
4. What is worse than Hate?
5. How does the mind or body influence Spirit?
6. If you or your dearest loved one was dying, what would you do?
7. How do you count your blessings?
8. Whom do you thank for your blessings?
9. How often do you pray?
10. What’s at the very center of your spiritual beliefs?
These are the basic, fundamental questions you should have ready answers to. If not, you will not have Joy in your Spirit, nor will you have Peace in your Soul.
Knowing these is crucial for being personally responsible for your health. Not knowing these is a recipe for disaster. There are no short cuts to finding Peace.
There is a Peace that surpasses all understanding when you have done your best. Making excuses chases Peace away.
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.
Ever dreamed of being a writer, but haven’t “published” anything yet?
Are you an experienced writer and want to expand your reach, relevance and impact?
If you’d like to be a Guest blogger at any of the five-a-day blogs I write, please think about it over the holidays.
Most of you saw this coming, and 2010 promises to be the best year ever. How could it not be?
So, seriously, think about it.
I’ll never embarrass you or make you feel uncomfortable. Not intentionally anyway. I may embarrass myself occasionally, but that’s part of taking risks.
Beyond The Gray posted an interveiw with me last week. What joy! How cool is that? Pretty cool.
Click here to go directly to the Mid Life Celebration Guest Blogger interview.
Few things are more joyful than doing something positive for others. This is simply a starting point. Expect more of these as time marches on and don’t be surprised if I ask you to be a Guest Blogger.
Seriously. It could happen. Will you be ready? Do you have something important or funny (or both) to say?
I guarantee you do. No, seriously. You have talents and gifts that no one else has. And if you’ve never realized this before, may I humbly ask you to give some consideration to this thought? Carpe diem.
So I Googled five-a-day bloggers and got 367,000,000 search results, but nothing on the first page described anyone who actually writes five daily blogs.
Okay, no problem, let’s narrow the search, so I typed – “five-a-day bloggers” – using quotation marks to focus the search.
When was the last time you Googled anything and got only one result?
If you are new to Mid Life Celebration, welcome. Hope you find this (and the other four daily blogs) a refreshing visit in a cyber-world that is overcrowded with people trying to sell us stuff.
None of the five-a-day blogs I write are selling anything. Maybe hope and inspiration. But nothing that costs money.
Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture. In ten days, one year will have passed since Randy left our earthly world for his next journey, perhaps a heavenly world.
We will probably start to see news media marking this anniversary. In advance of this, I’d like to share his original You Tube Last Lecture.
Randy Pausch’s story inspired me, and I’m an already inspired kind of guy. And not only me, but millions of others, to recapture some excitement, and commitment, to our childhood dreams.
What did it for me was his attitude towards awful news – “You have three to six months to live”.
Whether you are unfamiliar with his story, or know it well, I challenge you to view The Last Lecture this weekend.
We can all be thankful he gave such an inspiring Last Lecture, although I’m sorry he had to.
Living with regret must be a painful exit from this world. Do something, now, while you still can. Follow a childhood dream to completion. Carpe diem, jeff noel
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and not a hundred or a thousand….. We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without”. — Henry David Thoreau
Sure looks good on paper.
I don’t know about you, but I have a lot on my plate:
Faith
Family
Career
These are the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Each one has a subset of additional topics.
1. Servant, Disciple, Church, Prayer, Emmaus Brothers, Catechism, First Holy Communion, Lector, Children’s Liturgy of the Word, Cub Scouts, Networker, Volunteer, Innovator.
2. Servant, Husband, Father, Son, Brother, Uncle, Nephew, Cousin, Neighbor, Friend, Home Owner, Yard Man, Mechanic, Pet Owner, Chief Financial Officer, Investor, Small Business Owner, Writer, Professional Speaker, Student, Leader, Teacher, Historian, Networker, Innovator, Runner, Athlete, Comedian.
3. Servant, Leader, Follower, Team Member, Teacher, Professional Speaker, Idea Generator, Envelope Pusher, Ambassador, Spokes Person, Student, Trainer, Lead Generator, Historian, Writer, Helper, Friend, Colleague, Profit Driver, Innovator, Traveler, Listener, Planner, Comedian.
No wonder it’s so challenging for me to relax.
I’ll tell you what though, I would rather be aware of this and consciously and consistently work on simplification, than to be oblivious.
