Gettin’ More of the Good Stuff: “What will my last words be?”

Hello folks, and welcome to the first article that I am writing in Over Easy, Please. It was quite a thrill for me to meet recently with Judy Sellin and her son Reece at Starbucks to pitch my proposal to write a regular biweekly column for their newspaper. I’ve been reading the newspaper since it first started coming out and have always been impressed with its potential- what it could become and what it may one day mean to the good people of the City of Fort Saskatchewan and area.

Over the last two years or so, I’ve been impressed as new columns have been added, and with pagination increasing new advertisers coming on board encouraged by the increasing readership. I decided I simply had to be a part of this upstart newspaper’s success!

To be more specific, my suggestion to the Publisher and Editor was that I write about positive people skills which is quite a broad topic about which I’ve been facilitating training for 13 years now. In particular, my training has centered on leadership and excellence in customer service and I have found that those folks with competency in one area tend to have noticeable competencies in the other- makes sense really because they’re both different sides of the same people skills ‘coin’, right?

I explained to the Sellins my earnest and heartfelt intent would be to help Over Easy’s readers enjoy more successful personal communications and human interactions both in the workplace and at home. In fact I wanted to call the column ‘Gettin’ More of the Good Stuff’. Pretty ambitious, but somehow I convinced them of the soundness of my plan and, well- here I am with my inaugural column! So just to put a little twist on my first presentation, instead of starting with ‘my beginning,’ I will instead start my first article by looking towards ‘my life’s ending’ (which by the way I’m hoping is a long, long way down the road).

Let me explain: everyone would like to be remembered for some little ‘pearl of wisdom’ that they were able to leave to help others through their life journey.

All of my personal favorites of course have already been claimed… John Kennedy saying ‘ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country… Winston Churchill call to arms ‘we shall fight on the beaches…’

Hey, I’m no different: I too wish to leave a legacy. I’d always wanted to be quoted for some amazingly intelligent revelation of truth that gives definition and certainty to our world. Alas, the wisdom that I can leave is not sophisticated, nor spell-binding. It shall be my fate to be remembered by the simplest and yet, I think, most important of all truths… ever.

So this is it… were I to expire tomorrow, the greatest and most meaningful thing I could ever say to anyone, in the fondest hope it might help not only them, but others also who they may care enough to pass this human and caring advice on to… I would say to them, “be kind”, just that.

There, I’ve said it in advance and hope that with these, the last words I expect to one day weakly but purposefully utter, I will be able to leave the world a truly better place encouraging the rippling of kindness across the globe and over the ages…for surely that is why we are here.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans used to sing ‘Happy Trails’ at the end of their show (the older folks will remember that)… I will end my columns similarly with “happy thoughts to you…”