Friday 2 December 2011

Just keep swimming...

You know what, sometimes my life has been really really really shit.

I had many years where, apart from my daughter, everything was truely shit, it is a wonder I was not brown with flies buzzing around me.

Anyhow something changed, a long story, but it involved being a Virgin (the make-up sort), turning 40 and realising how much I had missed life, thanks to some people I knew who gave me the best birthday gift I could wish for: a night out and a realisation I was still alive!

Anyhow, enough about the bad times. Sometimes having the bad times makes you value the good times even more, even if the good times are simple like seeing a star twinkle, or finding a fiver in an old handbag, or looking up and realising there is a rainbow.

Rainbows are traditionally signs of hope. Ethereal things, they are not tangible, but always make us smile, because we always think that at the end of the rainbow there is a pot of gold. The trouble is that the rainbow always keeps moving, no matter how hard we try to reach it. That elusive pot of gold is always j----uuuu---sss----tttttttt out of reach.

The truth is simple: there is always a rainbow. The important bit is this: The pot of gold is always there. It is under your feet. You have the power to find it and use it. One of my tattoos is a compass sign on my left foot (so I can always find my way home). It is just above a quote from Samuel Clemens "Explore, dream, discover" which is part of a larger quote:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
So throw off the bowlines.
Sail away from the safe harbour.
Catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore.  Dream.  Discover."

So: Why "Swim out to meet it"? Because sometimes to quote Dory you have to just keep swimming. Sometimes you have to take charge and DO SOMETHING to take you one step nearer to your goal. Don't wait for your ship to come in, get your knife between your teeth and swim out to meet the fooker!

So: Your homework for today. Identify one tiny thing you can do to take you nearer to your goal: put the biscuit down, go for a walk, go to bed earlier, make that call, say sorry, ask that person out for a drink.... Remember you have that pot of gold in your possesion: it is the most precious thing on earth: It is you.

I am proud you are my freind, so get your water wings on and get swimming!

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