Most people never think of putting the word grateful into their vocabulary because most of us feel entitled for the first twenty-odd years of our lives.
Then, when maturity kicks in, we know that we either stand on our own two feet or accept that some other person will think and act to enable us to put food on the table.
Then our brains start thinking, do we accept what we are given, then fit our lives to the money or do we become responsible for ourselves?
It’s only now that I feel grateful for the obstacles I encountered along the way that drove me to carry on; I am sharing this as I feel we will encounter far more upheaval than anyone has ever seen before, so don’t act shocked or lay down when it comes.
So grateful that I had Dyslexia; if not, I wouldn’t have been bullied when I was a boy. ( I still am a boy 😉)
So grateful for being called stupid for ten years in an institute called school.
So grateful for leaving that institution at 15 with none of their qualifications in memorising answers.
So grateful that my dad went to war as an ordinary boy and came back as an aggressive man.
So grateful for being beaten to a pulp many times yet still surviving.
So grateful when I was sixteen and one week old to have found a fifteen-year-old girl who loved me.
So grateful that I was there to protect her as the victorian upbringing she had of children should be seen but not heard as a good slapping would be administered.
So grateful that food rationing carried on well after the war and finally stopped in 1955.
So grateful that I was refused a mortgage at sixteen, saying we didn’t have a f**king chance of ever getting one.
So grateful for living in a ten-foot caravan with my wife and three-year child through the winter of 1973/4.
So grateful to have had the mental strength to decide to look after my family myself.
So grateful to have gone through the 1973 recession and the three-day week. (Three days of electricity, four days of candles)
So grateful for surviving on scraps that most would throw in the garbage.
So grateful for paying 17% interest in the 1980s for an overdraft on our business.
So grateful for paying 21% interest in 1992. (It was called black Wednesday😉I wonder what it would be called now)
So grateful to Muhammad Ali and all my other mentors for teaching me to focus on the prize by ducking and diving every minute of every day. ( and night)
So grateful to have found the poem of Rudyard Kipling in 1982.
If—
Rudyard Kipling – 1865-1936
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!