Disney Leadership Keynote Speaker
Five daily blogs about life's 5 big choices on five interconnected sites.
Midlife Crisis is a household name.
There are two Mid Life Celebration Guest bloggers who are not.
Up first, this Sunday, is Erika Liodice, from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.
Erika found Mid Life Celebration and invited me to be a Guest Blogger at her blog, Beyond The Gray.
Lorie Sheffer is also from Pennsylvania, and from my hometown of Spring Grove. Small World After All.
You’ll find their Midlife perspectives similar, but different.
Carpe diem!
“What can be added to the happiness of a person who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscious?” — unknown
If ever there was a logical goal in life, perhaps this one should be near the top.
Simple.
Elusive.
Impossible?
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….
Mid Life blogging is easy and it’s hard.
Easy because you can choose to do whatever you want. You’re the boss.
Hard because you may not achieve your goal. Assuming you had a goal in mind that led you to blog, not reaching it could be a huge disappointment.
I hope you don’t give up.
Whether you are blogging at mid-life, or getting in shape at mid-life, or even mending some important relationship at mid-life, may you find the strength and courage to keep going.
Life is hard, that’s the conversation I had today with our eight-year old son.
But at eight, it’s really hard to comprehend.
At mid-life, we could all write a book, eh?
You know, I was actually thinking about a comment a speaker made in February at the National Speaker’s Association Winter Conference, here in my “backyard” – Walt Disney World.
He said, “Don’t die with a book in you“.
Words to live by.
And a hard decision to make on what to do with a comment like that.
Good luck and carpe diem, jeff noel 🙂
Know what she said?
Yesterday I heard one of our school’s middle-aged, elementary school teachers, with 35 years teaching experience, soliciting our parental feedback to make next year’s annual elementary, overnight camping trip more successful.
And in the process, she revealed two concepts I had to write down, because I thought they were profound. Now I’m sharing them with you.
First, she talked about the “Scared Privilege” it is to be a school teacher. And you could really feel her passion and sincerity.
It made me wonder what some of my sacred privileges are. Immediately, I had a decent list. Here are a few:
Being alive at Mid Life.
Being the parent of a student.
Being married.
Having good health and a roof over my head.
You know what it made me think?
It made me think. “Virtually everything we have is a sacred privilege”.
Secondly, she talked about her simple process for using any advice we give.
“Tweak it or toss it“!
What she meant was if something isn’t working too well, tweak it. If it doesn’t make it better, toss it.
It made me wonder how long I hold onto something that doesn’t work, without even trying to tweak it.
So today, I promise to relish my scared privileges and tweak the way I find time to be in the moment of our Mid-Life Celebration.
Make it a sacred day, because if you don’t, who will? Carpe diem, jeff 🙂