How a change of mindset made an old man happy.
By rights, I should not be here. I am loved, but I should not exist.
In reality, my parents probably should never have married; they certainly were ill-suited to remain in an unhappy and incompatible relationship throughout my childhood.
They split up when I was 13-years old. If things had not been intolerable up until that point, what followed certainly put the icing on the cake. It was not an amicable separation. All the pus and decay that had been festering for years erupted into a vile stench that lasted years more. Our family finally divided – and Christmas celebrations were apart.
It is easy to hold on to grudges. The blame-game that is born of resentment and judgement can become life-long rulers if you let yourself become enslaved. I realized this early on into adulthood that we have a choice to make:
We can carry the past with us as a burden or change the future to be free.
In that moment of clarity, I made the conscious decision that my past would be used to shape my future positively, not hold me back in chains. The mindset shift that is required to ‘let go’ and be free. It’s not a memory-erase, I have still experienced my past and remember those days explicitly. But history doesn’t have to repeat itself. It doesn’t need to be on some habitual loop impacting on our life today.
For me, it meant changing the relationship I had with my father and building new bridges – even if shaky, foundations have to start somewhere.
It meant following a new course, making my own footprints count on a path less travelled.
It meant sticking to the journey, remaining committed long-term through everything that comes along the way.
It meant enabling my son to have a positive relationship with his grandad from the outset and modelling to him that family-ties can reunite, even if they get broken.
Last Christmas, I made an old man happy. My wife, son and I travelled to a house we rented for a few days over the holiday season with one purpose in mind – to have a family Christmas that my father could be a part of for the first time in over 30-years.
It was a small thing on the face of it, but it was something that had been made possible by planting a seed so many years before….
As the Spirit of the Christmas season swings into focus, now is the time for celebrating the birth of goodness, the time for giving and bringing peace to our earth.
Embrace the season, embrace positive mindset that brings so much more when you focus on giving.
And as we plan our Christmas 2024 in a similar way, it is the small steps we choose to take every day that makes it possible to Live Daring Dreams.
Message to start your life coaching journey.
#LiveDaringDreams
