Things have been happening to me lately. Positively. It’s like I have given out to so many people and now I am receiving back. In droves.
After having my extraordinary and wonderful conversational experience with my doctor, I finally returned home. After cooking wonderful vegetarian spaghetti Bolognese, obviously without the Bournas :-), I am sat down to watch randomly chosen Netflix film. This one was about Jessica Watson, a 16-year-old Australian who has become the youngest person to sail around the world single-handed with no stops.It was an incredibly motivating, exhilarating, and tearful story.
From a very young age, she was fascinated with sailing and dreamt of sailing around the world single handed. A story of courage, determination, in the face of adversity, is a story that I recognise. There was even a point when she was flipped over in her little boat, and almost dragged to the bottom of the sea. But she managed to, or rather the boat managed to right itself.
What I was very taken by the story, and there is an enormous amount of internal joy and confidence that resonated with me. Today I went swimming, and saw the usual suspects including Joule, the man who laughs all the time, and is permanently happy as a joy to be around
As I was passing him doing my front crawl, he shouted out “Do you know Mike, you are a pretty good swimmer?” I stopped immediately and turned and ask him “What do you mean?” He then said that I was swimming in a straight line with no deviation which meant I was using both arms. So I asked him if I was lifting my right arm to which he replied “Absolutely. It’s coming out of the water for the first time. At least, I haven’t seen you do that before!”
I asked him to repeat what he had said as I was not sure if I had heard him correctly. And he repeated ever so loudly and smiling and laughing at the same time that I was lifting my arm out of the water and it’s very good to see.
I mean WOW! That’s incredible! I was so proud and pumped that I swam more lengths than I have ever done before. And now I am really tired. But that did not stop me from going for a very long walk and then going out to dinner with some very good friends in my appartment block, André and Diana.
I cannot begin to say how energised and motivated I am from a series of events in the last couple of days that have and are profoundly improving my drive, grit and determination to carry on. It really is so rewarding. I am smiling from cheek to cheek as I write this.
These are the stepping stones of progress.
So... 