When you feel drained, tired, beat up, and doubting if you can keep your stability, your sanity, stop… take some slow deep breathes, and find your beat, your peace.

Perspective:

We are tourists on this Earth. We are visiting, passing through like a tourist for a time. Perhaps 80+ years, 95 or 100 if we’re lucky. Less than 40-years if not so lucky. So this makes our short tour here pure gold. How will we/I make those 50, 60, 80 brief years on this Earth? How will we impact others, family and the ones we love deeply through the great times as well as the hard times? Times like right now during this pandemic? What is your/my part in it? How will it be remembered?

One of my all-time favorite stories and top five films is Sydney Pollack’s 1985 blockbuster Out of Africa. Toward the end of the movie after Baroness von Blixen’s most trying, crippling last months in Nairobi, Kenya and being forced to sell off all of her belongings, giving up her farm-home, land, and Kĩkũyũ workers, she must explain to her head butler and dear friend Farah what is going on. The movie’s transcript:

Karen: [to Farah] Where I am going you cannot come.

Farah: There is no cooking where you are going?

Farah is confused by Baroness’ departure and why he cannot come with her so Karen shares an analogy he would understand.

Karen: Farah, do you remember when we were on safari, and during the day you would go ahead and find a camp, and build a fire?

Farah: Yes. And you would see the fire and come to this place.

Karen: Well, it will be like that. Only this time I will go ahead and build a fire.

Farah: And this place you are going…it is very far away?

Karen: Yes.

Farah: (after a pause) Then, you must make this fire very big, Sabu, so that I can find you.

We must continue. Move on, move along. Get to the next campfire to rest for the night. Build that fire! And let that fire grow. Let each of them grow as this song goes…

When things seem unbearable, seem to be frustrating over and over and over where everything and everyone seem to be acting stupid and against you… like not being unified team players… and you ask yourself more than once “Why? What’s the point?” and you want to throw your hands up or yield to something or someone you KNOW you are not…

Then that is when you must dig deep. Relight your fire, fan that fire again and again, and rise to move forward again, fight again! This is now. This is our one and only chance to do better, again, and be right, DOING the right thing as many times as it takes. By keeping yourself safe, doing social-distancing, being the best team player not a bitching Prima Donna, your fire burns huge, burns alive and well for many, not one.

“Let it burn, let it grow!”

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Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always

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