Over the life of this blog, I’ve written quite a lot about CF, it’s affects and my life as well as the lives of others with the incurable condition.

I’m one of the lucky few to have survived and thrived after a double-lung transplant that saved and transformed my life four-and-a-half years ago, but this week is CF Week in the UK and I wanted to see if I could tell a different story.

On Sunday night, a wonderful adopted-Aunty of mine posted a heart-felt, inspiring and moving message to her Facebook friends about her daughter, who has CF. I immediately asked her if I could re-print it on the blog to share with everyone who’s not connected with her.

Happily, she agreed. This post is her words, in full, which are far more eloquent, emotive and impactful than I think I could have managed and, as you’ll see at the end, they sum up everything that SmileThroughIt represents.

Continue reading

It’s fair to say that the last few weeks and months have been an uncertain time for me. Giving up a well-paid job, striking out on my own without any guarantee of income or success, trusting just my self-belief and abilities will get me through.

It started as a deeply fearful period. The initial levity of being able to work in my PJ’s if I so desired soon dwindled back into the freelance reality of no work, no money.

Yet even as I faced this most uncertain of times, I started to see and appreciate the world around me again. Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading a lot more and helping to shape and form my ideas about how I go forward from here.

I’ve already written about how reading people’s bucket lists has inspired my own, but it was another book entirely that helped me reach a key realisation in my life and pin down the biggest mistake I’d made.

It’s all a matter of perspective, really.

Continue reading

There is a lot written all over the ‘net about getting started. Often including the wonderful Lao-tzu quote:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu

My journey will only be 26.2 miles, but my single step happened incredibly quickly.

Continue reading

Some people say it’s impossible to be truly happy with everything in your life. As the first noble truth of Buddhism tells us:

If you are alive, you will suffer.

While that may be true – and may make life sound unappealing – it’s also true that the best way to get closer to true happiness is to know yourself.

Not merely by identifying your wants, needs and ultimate goals, but to really dig deeply into yourself and understand what drives you, what de-motivates you and what causes you to go running for the hills.

Continue reading

Getting started can often be the toughest step in creating or achieving anything.

For me, fitness is always hardest habit to get in to – I have all the best intentions, but there is always a good reason for me not to start today.

Writing can be similar – you’re just not quite at the right point to start filling in the blank page yet, you need to take more notes, research more source material, create more mood boards.

Anything and everything we want to achieve in our lives, from creation to life goals, needs a beginning, that moment when we decide “Let’s do this”.

For anyone else who struggles with this in the same way I do, check out this slightly odd but seriously brilliant video by Ze Frank:

What are you going to start today?

I’d planned a post for today about something completely different1, but that’s been thrown out of the window by the devastating news that our friendly local pharmacist in my sleepy little Northamptonshire village died in a car crash on Tuesday – an incident I happened to see the aftermath of as I drove down the opposite carriageway.
Continue reading

1. Truth be told, I’ve no idea what it was [↩]

I’ve been reading a lot over the last few weeks about people’s life goals, projects and passions and trying to form my own ideas about where things go from here, following on from my commitment to forging my own path on the blog last week.

Joel Runyon over at Impossible HQ recommends making a list of impossible things you want to achieve – his logic being that only by reaching for the impossible can we achieve the remarkable.

Others focus on awesomeness, bucket lists or things to do before you die.

All of these pages are great (and truly inspiring), but I’m don’t 100% side with any of these. For one thing, I’m a strong believer in the English language and that impossible is exactly that – 100% not possible. However, I also strongly believe that there is very little in this world that is genuinely impossible; most of the time the things that we deem impossible are just very, very hard.

What my week’s reading has done is to inspire me to create my own List of Infinite Possibilities.

Continue reading

Throughout our lives we all regularly come to crossroads. Two paths lead off in differing directions and we have to try to peer into the distance and see which is best.

Sometime we choose the path most trodden, the path that will take us to the thing we can see most clearly on the horizon. Other times, emboldened by our curiosity, the path less take, more grassy and less well-marked. We may not be able to see where it will take us, but we’ll try it nonetheless.

So what do you do when you reach the end of the road not at a crossroads, but a simple ending of the path before you. What do you do when there is no apparent path to choose?

Continue reading

This week has been filled with a lot of thinking and far too little sleeping as I try to work out what I’m doing with my life.

I’m not alone in pondering the big “what next”; plenty of people go through this every day and my fellow transplantee Victoria blogged about it just this week, but for some reason I’m still at a loss.

It wasn’t until I took a long drive with my wonderful fiancée K today that I truly understood what drives me and what I really and truly want to do with myself.

SEEING THE NEGATIVE
For me, my new life is all about making a different, about showing people just what an amazing gift transplant is and why everyone should be signed up to the organ donor register in whatever country they call their home.

But I also realised that I’m currently driven my negative emotions: I don’t want to let my donor down; I don’t want to live a placid, unadventurous life; I don’t want people to look at me and think I’m wasting this opportunity.

FINDING THE POSITIVE
What I’ve realised I need to do above all else is to live for positive goals, to live for things that will drive me through ambition, excitement and joy rather than fear of failure or judgement.

I need to take positive steps forward, not resist stepping backwards.

Remarkable things and remarkable people only happen through their own determined, positive actions towards making their dreams, goals or passions turn into a reality.

We all know sitting around waiting for something to happen doesn’t make it so. But we never stop to think that going forward in fear and trepidation can be just as harmful to our eventual success as apathy and torpor.

A RESOLUTION
From now on, despite the bumps, the hurdles, the obstacles and the setbacks that I know will come my way, I vow to push forward, I promise to live my life in a positive frame, I pledge to smile through it all1 and stop living in fear of what might never be, but instead to fight for how I want things to be.

It’s going to be a long, hard road. I don’t yet know where it will take me, what I will achieve nor how I will achieve it, but I know that going forward with positivity, with happiness in my heart and in the knowledge that I can achieve whatever I set my mind to will see me through.

I want to take you along on the ride with me. Not just here, on the blog, but in the wider scope of things.

NEXT STEPS, BABY STEPS
I will shortly be setting up a Facebook page for Smile Through It where we can all share the things that make us smile from day to day and our own positive steps towards doing the things we really want to achieve in life.

I’m also currently planning a major new documentary film project to help tell my story, but also to understand the psychology behind people given a second chance at life.

Do we all feel a desire to make an impact, or is it just my twisted psyche that drives me to achieve big things? Do we all feel a pressure to make the most of life, or is it just about an appreciation for the little things?

More on that to come, no doubt, but for now, here’s to positive steps forward in the right frame of mind.

Keep smiling.

“In the end, it’s not about the years in your life that count, but the life in your years” Abraham Lincoln

1. I should have listened to myself earlier [↩]

Coping with any sort of change is something many people struggle with for as long as memory serves. It’s a commonly accepted truth that change is hard.

If you have time to consider, plan and embrace a change that’s coming, it makes the whole process easier to deal with. Sometimes, though, time to prepare for change isn’t a luxury that’s afford us.

So it is with my decision to leave markthree media, my professional home since July last year.

Continue reading