(Thanks to Dom Shaw for this).
‘You are not getting out of this alive, because this is life and you don’t get out of life alive’.
This blog has never been about ‘look at me’, at least it was never intended to be.
The latest book I’m listening to (when the anxiety subsides and I’m able to take any information in) is called Give and Take by Adam Grant.
It was in fact recommended in the previous book I read which was The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek.
Adam Grant is one of Simon Sinek’s main ‘competitors’ but Sinek was happy to recommend Grant’s book (which is wonderful) even though previously he saw Grant as huge competition and the comparisons between the two gave him anxiety.
I’ve not got through Grant’s book entirely but the essence is that generally givers do better than takers (and matchers who are the middle group) and whether it is true or not and having listened to the classifications at the start of this book, I am a giver.
I take great pleasure in sharing what we have made, much of the time for free with anyone who wants to listen, in the hope that things will get better.
I do that as an act in itself and not for significant gain, particularly in terms of education and the systems that we’ve got around the Practice.
Many times now I’ve seen my CBCT reporting sheet return back to me by other Practices who’ve never been on a course of mine, who don’t read the blog and I think that’s just because we gave it away so many times.
The difficult thing at the moment and in the circumstances that we find ourselves in, is that you want to pull everything into yourself and to protect your own environment as much as possible which is at odds entirely with my personality.
A little story to demonstrate from this morning.
I woke up early this morning, obviously thinking about the circumstances that I find myself in and trying to find some good news from somewhere and left the house about 6.25 a.m. to cycle to work.
For the past three or four weeks we’ve had a ‘mummy duck’ in the bushes outside of our house, right beside our front door and it turns out she’s been nesting for about a fortnight.
As it got closer to the hatching day, Magpies started to steal eggs from the nest and we found two episodes of duck carnage, one in the front garden and one in the back.
My wife then entered into protection overdrive with towels over the bushes where the ducks were and buckets to block the place where Magpies could get in.
When I left the house this morning there was a mummy duck and six ducklings on my drive, hiding behind a skip (we’d started work on the house before all of this and it’s not been completed).
I went back into the house and woke my wife to tell her that her ‘grandchildren’ had come out to play and she spent the next period of time ushering and escorting them across the busy road outside of our house, picking a duckling out of a drain that it had fallen in and making sure they got on their way to the pond.
Some people would go to these efforts and some people would not but the joy that it gave us and gave me was extraordinary and I must not forget through all of this that this is all life.
Navigating COVID-19 and the circumstances I find myself in personally and within the business is just another part of life because I’m not dead yet.
I write this here to remind myself and hope that the people that read this and are commenting on it regularly now get some perspective and sense from this too.
I said at the start of this that the greatest result was for my family to exit this intact and I meant their health.
Presently as it sits that will be true and so that is my baseline scenario and even if everything else goes by the wayside and we have a dramatic change in circumstances, we’ll all still be together and we’ll still be able to look after the ducks.
Blog Post Number - 2359