26 days — 26 learnings: Part twenty of looking back & looking beyond.
My word for today is:
Tenderness
If you happen to stumble on this post, please bear with me. It’s day 20, seven more days & seven more letters to go. I’ve decided to allow myself another D-tour, today. I planned on writing about timing. It’s a topic about which an entire book could be written. When is the time right? Today, tomorrow, later, someday, never? One thing is for sure, timing is important. As Ray Cummingham wrote: Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. What should we do right now, what should we postpone? Those are not straightforward questions.
Last year, more than one time, I felt like a book came to me at precisely the right time. There is a right time and place for things, I’d say. We just have to be careful not to use that as an excuse.
Especially given there is never a perfect time for anything. If you wait for the perfect time, you may well wait your entire life.
There is a little poem in the book “Timid salesmen have skinny kids” by Judge Ziglar.
It goes like this:
The Bride White of Hair
Is stooped over her cane
Her footsteps— uncertain — need guiding
While down the opposite church aisle
With a wane toothless smile
The bridegroom in a wheelchair comes riding
Now, who is this elderly couple thus wed?
Well, you’ll find when you’ve carefully explored it
Here is that rare most conservative pair
Who waited ‘till they could afford it.
It’s intended to help customers decide, that the time is now, no excuses permitted.
The poem spoke to me when I first read it. When I dug it back out, and read it aloud, I had to smile. We shouldn’t wait for the wrong reasons, nonetheless, if a couple like that, would come down the aisle, I’d love to be there and photograph her white hair touching his forehead and his toothless mouth gently kissing hers.
In the end, timing isn’t what matters most. Tenderness is.
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts. — Adlai E. Stevenson
My learning for today therefore is:
When we hold one another with tenderness, absolutely everything else becomes secondary.
My take away for 2018: Be clear on your priorities. You know what they are.
