Celebrate Today

   What a whirlwind week! Iowa to Orlando and back led to many different people and places to see, food to eat, and miles to walk; a wonderful not as planned trip. I have had so many different blog ideas from the trip, but I wanted to start with one that struck me as we went to some Disney parks. The theme Celebrate Today is on the banners as you approach. I love that phrase – Celebrate Today. In two simple words, this sums up a very complex idea.

   Celebrate, take the saved for important and special occasions eat on the good china mentality, and apply it. It is an appreciation of the small and big things, a mentality that seeks out the good. When we look for the good, it is often that which we see. If I celebrate something, I am often looking forward to it. I anticipate the enjoyment of the moment, the sharing of a time or purpose with others.
   Today, notice the immediacy of that – really stop and take notice. Today, not tomorrow where we are looking forward to something which has not arrived. Today, not yesterday when we are looking back on what was and cannot be changed. Today, the immediate moment, the time we have and can change.
   Celebrate today. I am going to challenge myself to keep that Disney mentality moving forward. I hope you do to.

Just Think of All of Those Stories

   The car parks and I reluctantly leave the song on the radio. I walk up one block and down the hill on the other. An apartment complex, with ground mustard brownish yellow colored bricks, takes up about a quarter of the block. Inside are rooms and rooms filled with seniors who have come here to live as a place where they can get some basic assistance and no yard work. I see them on the patio, gathered in little conversational groups, and in more solitary fashion on the benches.

   With these people all gathered in one place, there are some days it is all I can do to resist heading in there with notepad and pen rather than continuing on past the library and then into work. These people have seen major world events and have walked through their own major life events. Surely they have something to share with us, a drop of wisdom, a guffaw or two, a need for a Kleenex type story, and then back to the guffaws.
   I don’t know that I will ever actually charge into that complex; notebook, pen, Kleenex, and listening ear all at the ready. But, I hope that someone does, that someone stops to gather the stories.