Most people count you out when you are born in the 70s with a perceived short life expectancy and physical limitations. This motivates you to exceed those expectations. My life was focused to being able to wake up another day, establishing myself professionally, and/or meeting the next goal or challenge I set for myself. Life was focused on proving them wrong.

I have fought hard to overcome daily pains and logistical challenges to continue to get up each day. Pushing myself to achieve professional goals and helping enterprise organizations change to optimize delivering high value to customers and their market space. Putting in a ton of hours to exercise to get the most that I can from my body, being able to walk and be more mobile. I put all this work in to have a life.

However, I was not leaving anytime to use this life to live. To live to experience new things. To live for seeing and feeling things that I did not know even existed.

Life will happen, Living it has to be deliberate.

For the first time ever my bare feet felt the sand of the beech. It was as if I was stepping on a fluffy cloud. I have never felt such an unusual, awesome feeling before with my feet. It was warm and the sand hugged my feet as I walked along the beach with my wife at my side.

I snorkelled for the very first time and got to see the most beautiful tropical fish with vibrant colours that cannot be described. The water was the most beautiful blue I have ever seen. The fish swam all around me. I felt such a freedom. I did not have to fight gravity, I was simply free. Like floating in a beautiful new world, so peaceful, so tranquil.

Diving down to heaven.  Yes, those are SpiderMan water wings...don't judge.... — Diving down to heaven. Yes, those are SpiderMan water wings...don't judge....

My wife and I have worked very hard at being a couple, excelling at work, and doing a number of community activities supporting various causes. Time was flying past us, before we knew it, 5 years had gone by since we last went away somewhere outside of Canada, ten years since we had went outside of Canada just the two of us.

This made me realize that I need to balance life with living. I’m still going to push myself both personally and professionally, but I need to take the time and reap the benefits of life by living and experiencing these moments. I need to take advantage of this while I’m blessed to have the mobility I do and my wife s able to join and assist me with us experiencing living.

Walking barefoot in the sand and snorkelling for the first time might not seem like a big deal to most, but for me it was something that I would have never dreamed of.

I’m always in awe of the awesomeness of people. During our vacation we met awesome peeps that made the above experiences possible. We always see on TV and read about the people that suck. However, the people that go above & beyond are rarely mentioned or noted as the exception. The last two years I have seen mostly the awesomeness of the human race, making the people that suck the exception.

Continue to push yourself. Continue to achieve. Remember to live for the moment, live for the experience, live for the memories, live while you can enjoy the most...simply live!

Losing a close friend this year taught me that we all have a finite amount of time...living is more than putting in time.

The Journey Continues

A lot of people approached me recently congratulating me on being brave. Also, a number of people asked me how I became so brave to challenge myself and put myself out there. I don't think I woke up one day and was instantly brave. Like everyone, I have fears, anxieties, and insecurities.

I believe what encouraged me to face these things is to deal with them more frequently. I would face my fears, anxieties, and insecurities, slowly pushing myself to achieving things that previously scared me. In doing scary things often, you get better at dealing with failure. The more you deal with making mistakes or not achieving something, the better you can recover from it. Doing this frequently makes this uncomfortable feeling your new normal. This is training your brain to live in this uncomfortable place. You're conditioning your emotions to deal with setbacks. You're conditioning yourself to get back up and show resilience. The more you do something the easier it gets. Using this structure/framework allows me to deal with the challenges and builds courage. The more accomplishments you've achieved (whether it's from a number of trial and errors or if you get it the first time) keeps moving you forward.

I also give a little credit of being stubborn to overcoming fear. I tend to want to face what people say is impossible, or unrealistic, as a challenge to overcome. Every great success story began with the notion of impossible or unrealistic… I like to fill in the rest of the story between the start and finish. It's not easy. It's very frustrating. It's really hard work. It's incredibly rewarding.

The last thing you want in life is to live with regret. Making mistakes gives you a chance to learn from them. If the number of missed opportunities pile up, it will give you a worse feeling than you would have ever experienced from being uncomfortable and recovering from failure.

Having a support structure around you to continue to support, inspire, console, and challenge you is essential. The power of your inner circle can either break you or encourage you… find your supportive circle.

It's very easy to point fault at someone or not to believe… If we want others to achieve success from being uncomfortable we have to support and encourage them.

Life is short. Life is a gift. Life is unfair. Life is hard. Life is awesome. If being uncomfortable makes you live it to the fullest… Why would you ever want to be comfortable?

What's Life Without Living?

I'm not brave, I just keep trying