You might have looked at the title and thought, has this bloke lost the plot, it’s February 5th not January 5th!!!
We’ll I have to admit I’ve had better starts to a year to be honest. 2nd week of January, my knee swelled up like a football, the redness, the pain….yes I knew immediately it was a gout attack. Now for those who’ve never suffered from gout, imagine a really, really, really nasty pain and then times that by 10. It is without doubt the most miserable thing I’ve ever experienced. I have not had a bad attack for many years, as I have been careful and tried to cure it through changes in diet etc etc.
Unfortunately, without realising it, I have not been looking after myself, so it’s all self-inflicted. Anyway after a week or so of being laid up with a very swollen sore knee, it decide to move into my foot and toe too. So another week of being laid up followed.
Thankfully, I have some good people in my network and people helped covering the business. So Last week of January arrived and on the Monday I hobbled back to work.
Then the next bit of the nightmare start to 2015 arrived, in shape of a phone call from my Mum in France to tell me that my Dad had passed away at lunchtime, thankfully in his sleep and without pain.
He had been unwell for sometime, so while it wasn’t a shock, but even so it still is very upsetting.
By the way I’ll get to the point in a minute and I am not writing this so that you feel sorry for me.
So the last few days have been spent still recovering from the dreaded gout and sorting out all the stuff with the family and taking time to grieve about my father.
So Tuesday, I finally got back to the hub and back to working a ‘normal’ day again.
The point of all of this is, that bad things happen in life, thankfully no where near as often as we fear and anticipate and it is how we react to them is so important.
It will obviously take a while to heal from the loss of a parent or someone very close, but it is also for me a motivator too. What I mean by that is that losing a parent brings into focus your own life, as a parent myself, and it makes me realise in the natural order I am next. Therefore, it is time to really focus on getting on with my life and get on with doing all the things that I want to achieve.
The other thing in all of this is that you can either wallow in the bad things or just say that these things happen, you can’t control them, just accept and then get on. We can all choose what mood or attitude to have when things go wrong.
So I am super positive about 2015, I know that my gout will go away soon, I know that I have to get back on the focus on my health and looking after myself. I am determined, which I know my father would have wanted, to use his passing as a motivator to me to push myself and get on with life.
My father died at age 86, he had a great life, he was mainly happy, always able to laugh and not take life too seriously. He didn’t suffer and he spent his last Christmas together with all his family and grand children. He didn’t chase material things and money, he focused on the important things in life. Even in his final days he still was able to laugh and joke, including his pleasure of persuading the hospital to let him have some beers.
So whatever, you are up against, it will pass and we all get just that one opportunity to make it happen, don’t be an extra in your own film, step out of the shadows and become the star.
Philip Dodson 