It is the year 2020 and I haven’t posted on this my personal blog in quite some time. The other day when I heard about the death of Kirk Douglas, an iconic actor and the last of the famed actors of his generation, I was preparing to blog, and also was reminded through his death of the short time we have to meet our goals.
Sure, Kirk lived to be 103 and was born in 1916, the same year that my father was born. Unfortunately for my father, a very hard working man, he only made it to 80 years of age.
Our lives are full of ups and of downs, sort of like a roller coaster but usually not as fast. We should take advantage of those moments we consider ups and use the moments to learn from in order to do what things that do bring us these positive moments. On the other side something can be said for the downs, that is the bad times. We can learn from them what not to do, or learn to look at them from a different perspective such as in the old saying “In every cloud there is a silver lining.”
Last year I had several health issues develop. I developed a kidney stone that couldn’t be passed and I ended up needing surgery for. As painful as it was what was more painful was that the doctor put a stent in my kidney for both healing and drainage purposes. Whenever I urinated while I still had this stent in my kidney it felt as if someone had grabbed ahold of my kidney and started squeezing as hard as they could. It was a very painful experience. The stent was there for almost a month and a half before it was removed. I am grateful for the thing that learned from this whole experience and that was to take better care of myself. Less caffeine, less alcohol, and not withstanding less animal protein especially red meat.
I still believe in everything in moderation but I realized that with the consumption of those things previously mentioned that they were definitely affecting my health. The need for change was in this case the silver lining in the cloud of having to undergo physical pain.