An Early Birthday Gift from My Dad

Tomorrow is my 49th birthday!  I embrace getting older and I feel so lucky to be in good health.  Most days I feel stronger than I ever have in my life.  I amaze myself at how much energy I have. I’m not sure what I thought 49 was going to feel like when I was 20 but I sure didn’t expect it to feel better than 20!

Getting closer to 50 makes me realize that half a century is a long time and I’ve had so many life experiences now.  Experiences that have made me stronger.

But . . . we all have our moments of weakness, don’t we?

I was up at our family farmhouse a couple of weeks ago.  I was starting up a barbeque the old fashioned way, just like my Dad taught me. You know, paper, kindling, logs . . . oooh I can build a mean one!

Step one is always the paper, we have a huge stack of newspaper that sits beside our barbeque pit and it is replenished constantly because we’re cooking delicious meals on it at least three times in one weekend.

As I was cleaning out the ash from the prior weekend I was thinking and worrying.  I was thinking about my business and worrying about all of the new plans I have for expansion.  The risks I want to take, the money that will be required and I was “What If’ing” about every single little detail.  Every “What If” ending with the scared feeling of “What if I fail?”.  It drives me crazy, these are common thoughts that every entrepreneur has, even the most positive ones!  These are the thoughts that hurt us and they are the ones we need to banish from our brains.  On this particular evening, I was finding it hard to banish these thoughts and I just kept going deeper into the fear.

The barbeque pit was now cleaned out and it was time to scrunch up some newspaper.  For whatever reason I decided to grab a paper from the middle of the pile.  I picked it up and the first thing I read in bolded print was “FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION”. Well that just about hit me like a ton of bricks!  Then I noticed the size of the paper was much smaller than the others, I turned it over because I was curious to see what this little paper was.  The Financial Post, my Dad’s favourite paper, one we haven’t had for six years, since he passed away.  How did it end up in this pile of papers?   I yelled out, “Thanks Dad”looked down at the paper again and noticed the date on it was August 5th1995.  Well this particular day a couple of weeks ago was August 5th 2018. I had goosebumps on top of my goosebumps.  “Okay, got it Dad, thank you!”

I believe there are signs all around.  We are being watched by our loved ones who have gone before us.  They still care about us.  It’s these moments when life slows down and we are only focused on one thing instead of a million, that we can receive these beautiful gifts meant just for us.

I might just spend my birthday meditating tomorrow on all of the good things to come.  I know that would make my Dad proud and he would call it time well invested.

Monica XO

Please join us for Treat Yourself Tuesday this week where the birthday celebrations will continue! Yup, I’m talking about cake, loot bags and some surprise deals!

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