New Beginnings, Peace and Love to 2019

Good Morning from Prince Edward Island, 

I certainly hope everyone I had a wonderful Christmas, I know we had a great family time. Tis' the Season.

It has been a few weeks since sitting down to write, and while a part of me missed writing, another part of me is represented in the story below.  I read a similar story years ago in a book by Gordon MacDonald, but I’m unable to recollect the title. 

"An archaeologist once hired some Inca tribesmen to lead him to an archaeological site deep in the mountains. After they had been moving for some time the tribesmen stopped and insisted they would go no further. The archaeologist grew impatient and then angry. But no matter how much he cajoled the tribesmen would not go any further. Then all of a sudden the tribesmen changed their attitude. They picked up the gear and set off once more. When the bewildered archaeologist asked why they had stopped and refused to move for so long, the tribesmen answered, “We had been moving too fast and had to wait for our souls to catch up.” The movie, Beyond the Clouds.

I certainly hope that this season was a good one for catch up for you and yours.

Our heart goes out to those who lost loved ones in 2018 and Christmas Day was just not the same for you or your family.

I thoroughly enjoy the week between Christmas and New Years, the time to reflect on the year past, to contemplate the year coming and in the spirit of improving upon lessons learned, determining what changes or habits are requiring tweaking.

“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” -Meg Wheatley

We love the downtime to read, eat and drink tea. One article that I enjoyed reading moved me to deeper reflection.  

This Is How To Have A Long Awesome Life: 7 Secrets From Research

A good start to adding more good years to your life would be to get rid of the anti-ageing quackery… These guys are just trying to sell you stuff. What does work is living the lifestyle of those who we know are living longer, like those people, I suppose, living in the Blue Zones? ~Thomas T. Perls, M.D., M.P.H, is the director of the New England Centenarian Study Enjoy the Read here.

It seemed to me this year perhaps more than others many writers put out suggestions on how to set “resolutions” into motion.

For example...Tim Ferris writes the following…

"I’m often asked about how I approach New Year’s resolutions. The truth is that I no longer approach them at all, even though I did for decades. Why the change? I have found “past year reviews” (PYR) more informed, valuable, and actionable than half-blindly looking forward with broad resolutions. I did my first PYR after a mentor’s young daughter died of cancer on December 31st, roughly eight years ago, and I’ve done it every year since. It takes 30-60 minutes and looks like this:

1. Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.
2. Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.
3. For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns.
4. Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”
5. Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2019. These are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense."

Bill Gates, stated in his GatesNotes blog, the following.

"I still assess the quality of my work. But I also ask myself a whole other set of questions about my life. Did I devote enough time to my family? Did I learn enough new things? Did I develop new friendships and deepen old ones? These would have been laughable to me when I was 25, but as I get older, they are much more meaningful.

Melinda has helped broaden my thinking on this point. So has Warren Buffett, who says his measure of success is, “Do the people you care about, love you back?” I think that is about as good a metric as you will find."

My contribution to getting organized is taking a simple piece of paper listing the category headings you see as important, the order is not as important. Categories such as Health, Fitness, Financial Security, Family, Friends, Spirituality, Travel, Learning/Growing, etc.

List each one, score it from 1 to 10, one needing attention right away.  Start taking baby steps with each of the categories you chose, just take one every day and you will get there.

For example, I always felt that I couldn't read fiction. (as a child was told often enough I was stupid, unfortunately, I listened) So I went about to change that mindset. Recently I set an easy goal of reading "one" chapter in bed every night before turning out the lights. I am excited to say, almost finished Washington Black, this year's Giller Prize winner, one chapter a night, (baby steps) and almost done. Whoohooo! Bring it on! Baby steps work!

All the best with your journey. What are you going to do differently in 2019?

Taking Care of Business: THANK YOU  to all who allowed us to serve you last year. Over a 1,000 responses to our post-shipment survey have been received. Some of your comments brought tears of joy while reading. Love Ya. Read some of them here.

I have been listening to a lot of wonderful music over the holidays, one that I enjoy listening to regularly is, a classical piano album called Impromptus by Katya Apekisheva. Enjoy a listen here

Today, listening to Polish pianist Marcin Wasilewski, Bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz join Wasilewski as part of his longstanding trio. Between the poetic lyricism of “Three Reflections” and the compelling acoustic makeover of the ’70s Herbie Hancock classic “Actual Proof,” the pianist spans a wide swath of modern musical language while spotlighting a vocabulary of his own. Enjoy a listen here.

I certainly hope 2019 is the year that brings more joy to YOU. Thank you for reading my post today.

There is so much natural beauty on Prince Edward Island, if you are on Instagram, you may want to follow. Katherine, our designer and photographer, has an amazing talent for seeing the beauty and sharing it through her designs and photos. Hope you join us here on Instagram.

With love from Prince Edward Island!

Sincerely,

Bruce

Ps. To Your Health

Doctor: "Have you been drinking fluids?"  

Patient: "Jeez, Doc, that's literally all I drink."