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May 1, 2024 – JOLT – May Day, May Day: Vitality & Life Alert

May Day! May Day! Vitality & Life Alert!

That’s not a distress call. It’s the age-old distinction of May 1.

Wikipedia defines May 1 as “a day that celebrates Spring. Maios (Latin Maius), the month of May, took its name from the goddess Maia (Gr Μαία, the nurse), a Greek and Roman goddess of fertility. The day of Maios celebrates the final victory of the summer against winter as the victory of life against death.”

So, in my glad tidings of May Day, I include a vitality and Life Alert question: have you fallen and can’t get up?

In my book, The Back Forty: 7 Essential Embraces to Launch Life’s Radical Second Half, I distinguish “The Incredible Shrinking World” of stagnation vs “The Ever-Widening Expansive World” of possibility.

As we grow and discover more in the process of life (aka, “age”), we can go one of two routes:

The first is the path of being “right” about the way we are, the way others are, and the way life “is.” That path has us condense into an ever-shrinking world of no-possibility because we selectively see what we want which confirms those beliefs, which then has us believe them even more. The result: we get to be “right!”

The other path is one of possibility, where we dedicate ourselves to curiosity and “playing first” (aka, before knowing or controlling an outcome, simply getting on the playing field), not operating like we “know” but, rather, truly out to discover and become more aware of what exists outside of our constructed realm of best-thinking. This results in ever-more new awareness that confirms this path of expansion. The result: more possibility.

As in most realms of personal development, the “road less travelled” is the hardest. It takes something special to let go of our age-based sense that we should “know” life by now, as well as our age-defined risk intolerance, afraid to reveal that we don’t.

So, bringing it all home, have you already decided what’s possible and what’s not around your:

  • Career?
  • Romantic life?
  • Health and vitality?
  • Financial foundation?
  • Passionate purpose?
  • Second half of life?
  • [Fill in the blank]?

If so, let May Day, when the victory of summer against winter symbolizes “the victory of life against death” be your wake-up call to turn your spiral outward again, like it was when you were young. Your age is just a state of mind.

So, your AI (Aspiration Intelligence) enhanced mission, should you choose to accept it, is to shift your bearings from “right” to possibility so that the sunlight of the Spirit can reveal things you wouldn’t have believed could unfold for you. That’s a Life Alert worth getting up for?

Think differently, play better.

Radically,

Darrell

CareerGuy and Back Forty Freedom Flier