Do you celebrate meaningful milestones in your life? Or, do they come and go like the seasons – here and gone before you know it.
In two days, I’m celebrating one year of writing five daily blogs.
The learning curve has been amazing. Sometimes steep and challenging. Sometimes flat and easy.
At jeff noel.com, I wrote a Mid Life Celebration summary. Wanted to share it here, one last time, before it’s removed:
“Mid Life Celebration is where I challenge myself to: Rethink. Reprioritize. Recommit.
There are four key areas to my life, every life actually, and I share thoughts, tips and on a good day, a decent dose of motivation.
I’m challenging myself, because I’m crystal clear on the fact that none of us is going to live forever.
I am very thankful for the wake up calls in my life. I no longer ignore the clock. I embrace it and am inspired by it. What about you? What have you got to lose, seriously?”
As we go through life, we have obvious opportunities and some not so obvious. Have you ever considered this as part of your reality?
Many of the biggest opportunities happen at midlife. What we do when they arrive makes all the difference.
And the most overlooked, and inexpensive, opportunity to keep motivation alive is to celebrate milestones along the way. They come in three sizes: small, medium and large.
Yesterday I promised a few of mine, in an effort to practice the preaching. And by the way, all within the past 72 hours:
309 pages of raw content (not blog related)
Met with CPA
Ran 5 miles without any foot pain
Eight hours of sleep for 7 consecutive days
347 straight days of starting each day on my knees
Do you find time to celebrate your milestones, no matter their size? What if you did.
Isn’t that what leads us to the proverbial midlife crisis?
Ambition. Can’t live with it. Can’t live without it.
Or can we? Live without it, I mean.
And maybe not live without it, but alter the course of our ambition.
I mean, alter it from selfish to selfless.
And by selfish, I don’t mean to say it’s wrong to be professionally ambitious.
And by selfless, I don’t mean we should sell all our belongs and live with just the shirt on our back.
But there is this rare opportunity, at it’s peak in mid life, that we can really get serious about where we currently are and where we ultimately want to end up.
Most likely, at midlife, these are two diametrically opposed paths.
Thank you for visiting Mid Life Celebration. I know most of you are insanely busy. How? Because I’m one of you. It’s also easy to predict that most of you will not have time to click on this video, especially if you’re reading from a handheld device.
So this is for the others. The few. The ones who know full well that life is hard and that carving out time has to be some one’s responsibility.
Did you watch the sunset last night? Or the sunrise this morning?
Time marches on. This is a beautiful story. Just like last night’s sunset. But you really have no idea do you?
“When everybody tells you that you are being idealistic or impractical, consider the possibility that everybody could be wrong about what is right for you.” — Gilbert Kaplan
Men of a certain age is the target audience for Mid Life Celebration. Baby Boomer men, and Gen X men over 40 years old.
All are welcome, of course. Yesterday’s Mid Life Celebration Guest Blogger, Lorie Sheffer, recommended “Men of a Certain Age” on TNT, tonight (Monday’s) at 10PM.
Click here to view Men of a Certain Age website. Viewing it will give you a quick idea whether or not you want to check it out. I’ll have to record it because 9:30PM is “lights out”.
Took a quick look yesterday. Really liked what I saw.
If you’ve seen it, and feel like it, share a quick comment about the show. Happy Monday.
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.
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?
