2023 August 1 The best opportunities are unexpected

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about unexpected discoveries. So let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave me a like, tell your friends and send me a message. First off, happy August. Time is really flying by this summer. I hope that you've been having a really nice summer (or winter, depending where you're listening from). 

So this past weekend was a really good weekend for me, but it was nothing like I had planned. I went to drop something off at church for a friend, and ended up going down to the nearby waterfront. I hung out there for about an hour. It wasn't really something I'd planned to do, but just decided to do something different rather than just run an errand and come home. It was a nice quiet time. 

It's always very peaceful down there, watching all the sailboats and their berths. It's always pretty rare, in my experience, to see a sailboat not tied up at the dock. I think sailboat owners, perhaps more than any other purchaser of large objects and large toys, spend their time not using what they just bought. It just always looks very pretty.

I've been to a number of different marinas, and they always look very nice sitting there, in nice rows all lined up waiting to be used. Very rarely are they used, it seems. But one of the neat things was when I was down there, as it was getting towards the end, I looked out onto the water and there was a pretty skilled and experienced captain bringing in a 41 foot sailboat.

Now you might think 41 feet. How big is 41 feet? It's big. If you're on a powerboat that's 41 feet long, it's a lot of boat to handle. When you're on a sailboat, you have everything else to deal with at the same time. Granted, he was under motor power, but nonetheless. So he comes cruising in. It's a creek, and it's reasonably wide there. 

He was in the creek heading up, and there was another boat tied up in the same dock that he was going to. He swung it around. It's a 41 foot boat. It doesn't turn on a dime. He wasn't going fast, but he wasn't going slow either. He had plenty of clearance around the other boat, and moved into this small berth, and it looked like he was parking a VW Beetle in a large parking lot. He made it look absolutely effortless. It was really just simply enjoyable to see someone who didn't just buy a toy to show off, but actually was skilled and enjoyed using it. His family seemed to be having a good time too.

It was a lot of fun to see somebody who invested a lot into something actually using it and not just to show off, because they really enjoyed it. It was a very nicely equipped boat as well, and it didn't have all these show off toys. It didn't have like six radars on it, or five dinghies hanging off the back, each one more expensive than the other. It had really functional accessories and safety equipment. So clearly, he was very serious about it and they really used it and enjoyed it. The whole experience reminded me a lot of what we talk about and teach here. The only thing limiting us very often is ourselves.

This gentleman who was captaining the boat as I was watching,  I'm sure he's made many decisions thus far in his life, but they appeared at least to have been aligned with his goal of being able to be on his nice sailboat with his family on a Friday during the day, just spending some time together, then bringing it in to have dinner. 

So it was really a very nice start to the weekend, because it was somewhat introspective. I sat and thought about it, and thought about the decisions he possibly made in his life. Of course, you're just guessing how somebody else's life is. But it was very nice to start the weekend off on a really positive note. It really encouraged me to focus on my life goals. This was still just Friday night. I still had the whole weekend to go, and I thought, This is actually a pretty good start.

Then on Saturday, I spent the day taking a credit bearing course, on inductive hearing loop design. This is in support of the older members of the church community, and it's totally aligned with my goal. I try and do it to make everything possible, to be ADA (American with Disabilities Act) compliant.

It's why there are ramps into stores, and doors that open with assistance, and ways for people who are hard of hearing to hear things when otherwise they would not. Hearing loops are a technique for broadcasting audio signals directly into compatible hearing aids,  so you don't hear all the room echo. That's a really simple explanation of it. In a lot of cases, the cost of installing a hearing loop is really not all that huge, but the positive impact it has upon the community or the visitors is tremendous. 

When you get in a situation where there's a lot of echo, such as  a huge room like a church, it really makes it extremely difficult for people to understand everything. I was looking into the theory and practice and of how hearing loops work, and actually of taking a real course on the design of hearing loops.

I'm an engineer, and engineers can do anything eventually, right? If they study enough, theoretically. So it turned out to be a really nice day, because I was doing something that was moving me towards my goals. It was something I found intrinsically interesting. 

Then on Sunday afternoon, I was asked to go and tidy up another church property, which is being sold by the archdiocese. Honestly, I just wasn't really in the mood. I didn't feel like doing this. But I decided, there's no better time, and I should just do it.

I went grocery shopping after church, then went home, changed, loaded up the truck, went back down to start doing some landscaping and cleanup. It turns out the people across the street from the church, who I've gotten friendly with, were moving out that very day. It was their last day in the house. They were super excited about moving, about an hour away. If I hadn't run into them, I wouldn't have seen them before they left, or seen them again. I would've completely missed them. I had no idea where they were leaving.

We probably chatted for nearly an hour while working together, and I did get the church property all tidied up. Plus I got some exercise, so it wasn't a bad afternoon. It was just a really nice chance to run into these people and be able to make their day a little better and help them out. I've been in that situation, where you've been working all day and the sun's going down. You're just out of energy and somebody walks in and kindly says, Hey, can I help you? Let me get that for you.  It reenergizes you. That's how they both looked. Both he and his wife were just relieved to have somebody come in and share some of their burden with them, and make it seem a lot smaller than it seemed a few minutes before.

So, looking back, I realized that I had three or four awesome pick-me-up moment and life lessons, even when each of the days could have just as easily been perceived as drudgery and work. I also got a very good firsthand introspection over the power of goal setting.

Overall, it was really quite a powerful and fun weekend. I was able to wish the older couple a happy return to be closer to the family, which was why they were moving, as well as cheer them up and bring some fresh energy into the day for them. I got a physical workout for myself, which I always need, and it made my own work considerably easier because I had stuff to do. 

I thought I should just hustle through this and get back and see if they need anything. Saturday, wasn't work at all. It was a long day. It was seven hours of study, but I was excited for what I was doing because of the reason I was doing it. I think it's really important to remember that life isn't full of amazing events with big banners and signs and flashing lights. 

Life is full of amazing events, events hidden right in plain sight, if you take the time and open up your life so that you'll be able to let them find you. I had three major positive events this weekend, along with a number of nice smaller ones because I just went slightly out of my comfort zone. I very easily could have grumped through the whole weekend and missed everything. If I'd done those things and just done them with a bad attitude, I probably still would've missed most of the good stuff, if not all of it. 

As we talked about last week, that's really the point, isn't it? If we open ourselves up to life, life has a way of giving us gifts in return, and the best gifts often aren't the biggest gifts. Chances are, you've had one or two situations where someone was really trying to make you happy or feel special. Perhaps they did something totally over the top, like maybe they got you a car or a fancy piece of jewelry. 

And yet, the part of that day that you really remember may be some other part, something totally different. Maybe you were walking out the house on the way to that surprise, and they picked up a little flower out of the lawn and told you they loved you, or just held the door for you and winked when you walk by. Big and amazing things don't have to be obvious, and more often than not, it's really the unobvious that has the deeper meaning. It's the core of mindfulness. It's just being open to being aware of all the things that are around you. As you're walking to your appointment trying not to be late, and you're thinking, Oh, which is the fastest way across the sidewalk? If you just step back for a second, you're still able to notice the flowers or the nicely kept building even with your hectic day.

Your homework (always optional, of course) is to think of some tasks you had to do, or perhaps maybe you didn't do them, or you did them when you were unhappy the entire time. Now imagine if you'd done them with a more positive attitude. Do you think you would've felt better? Instead of finally being done, maybe you could be excited about how much nicer something looked, or that you had a difficult conversation that is behind you now, maybe something was resolved. 

Extra points if you can revisit that situation in your mind, and imagine (since we can never know what might have happened). But just imagine some of the things that might have occurred if you just worked with a smile on your face and a positive attitude, had a kind word for everyone that you met.

These things can make a huge difference both in your attitude and in the attitude of everyone around you. They can take a situation that may be uninteresting or really distasteful, and turn it into something that's either good or tolerable, or at least something that you feel good about completing.

That's it for the evening. As always, please remember the war in Ukraine. If you can and you're able, please donate. UKR7.com has links to many places. World Central Kitchen is at WCK.org. Lots of ways to give, there or elsewhere in the world. There's a lot of people who need help. As we talk about often, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. When you look outside your own life, it really changes your perspective on the world. 

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. Please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.