When I started this blog it was about trying to keep on top of things, those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Shakespeare told us about. It was about charting my journey up to and beyond transplant and all the weird emotions and exciting opportunities it brought.

Now, though, I want it to be more than that. Partially because I’m now blessed to have a life that’s much like anyone’s: I have a full-time job making a real difference in people’s lives, I have a loving wife and a beautiful home to come home to every night, I have everything I ever wanted from my extra time in life, bar a few of the more outrageous and/or longer-term goals I came up with beforehand.

So I want this blog to be about more than just me and my journey, but to stay true to the principals under which it began.

This year, I’m going to set out to make Smile Through It a place where you can come for inspiration and education of all kinds. (Except the bad kind of ‘education’ that just made you suddenly wonder if you want to come back here at all, I won’t be doing any of that stuff.)

I want this blog to become a place where you can discover and share stories of living life in the most honest way possible. That doesn’t mean people going on crazy adventures: an honest life is simply about living authentically to yourself. And if that’s a little too ‘new age hippy’ for you, think of it like this: happiness comes from living the life that fits you, nothing more.

This, then, will be a period of adjustment for me as I work out how best to make all of this happen, but it will involve lots more storytelling (because I’ve not done nearly enough of that on here in recent months), it will involve a lot more of other people’s stories, and it will hopefully involve more than just reading.

I’d love to hear from you to know what you get out of this site and what you’d like to get from it. What posts really inspire you and make you want to do things, what bores you to tears and never makes you want to come back, and what would you love to see more of from me?

Please get in touch however you’d like: you can email me (or use the contact form on my personal website to be sure of passing spam filters), you can Tweet me, you can even find me on that weird and lonely place they call Google plus (however amazed you may be that it’s still going).

Smile Through It is a philosophy on life that I’ve let slip in recent weeks and months, and it’s time we got back to what mattered. So here’s to a 2015 full of growth and development for me, for this blog and, hopefully, for you, too.