Life is short and passes like a train or when reality hits you hard. You can burn the candle at both ends and play with fire even with the best of intentions.
I got quite a slap in the face recently; a good one I might add. One of my good cycling buddies, of my age (60’s), with whom I ride between 1000km and 2000km per year, died.
It gave me a chill…
What is your situation, really?
Yves was training hard; spinning every other day. 1h53m of Swift in the morning and then, in the night, he went the other way… just like that!
And what’s even more depressing is that I think we lead a relatively healthy life, if you don’t count the occasional abuse of good wine. I watch my diet, so I’m not too overweight, I exercise 5-10 hours a week, I take time to enjoy life every weekend with my wife and often with our kids. I practice a lot of sports just for fun; cycling, cross-country skiing, ski touring, downhill skiing, badminton…
It’s not uncommon for me to spend more than 16 hours outside on weekends, whether it’s for sports or for maintenance of the grounds and property at the cottage.
Of course, I enjoy a good meal with family and friends and some good wine. And I know it was the same for my friend.
Time to Wake Up
So the question arises, because God knows that as entrepreneurs, we are all caught up in the whirlwind of performance to the point where we often lose track of the day.
Do we really need a slap in the face to wake up?
Of course, some of the more daring or enlightened ones, you might say, listen to their inner voice and take a break, take a walk on the wild side or completely change their life pace or job.
But the reality is that the vast majority of us, quickly forget this flash of lucidity that strikes us from time to time and go back on our way with our performance, income and retirement objectives in mind.
And without realizing it, we are also more and more immersed in performance on a daily basis… by professional deformation perhaps, who knows.
And very few of us share with our loved ones, these moments of lucidity that inhabit us from time to time… these wake-up calls.
Do you have a Magic Trick, as Uncle Tom used to say
I call these moments of clarity wake-up calls, because my friend’s death; that was a slap in the face.
And the fact is that almost all of us wait until we hit a wall or get a slap in the face before we pause and reflect on what we are experiencing.
I’m telling you all this to tell you that, like our friend Pierre Lavoie who has been promoting fitness for a long time and who has also been slapped in the face a few times in recent years, he mentioned it in January in an article by Yves Boisvert in LaPresse: “When your sporting heart fails”, you might need to learn to “release the pedal a bit”.
And I would add that in case of a heart attack, while waiting for the ambulance, the proper application of CPR techniques can make all the difference. When was the last time you received CPR training?
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