While You Are Still Alive, There Is Always Hope

I have a mug, which I often drink out of on coaching calls.

On one side, it has the logo of the singer-songwriter, Frank Turner. On the other, it has three words:

Not dead yet.

The words are a quote from his song, Get Better, with the refrain, ‘we could get better because we’re not dead yet.’

I can still remember the first time I heard it, on a tinny phone speaker, walking down the road in South West London. When I sent it to my friend, Russ, he said ‘Wow, that blew the cobwebs out.’

When I want to blow the cobwebs out, and shift my energy, I often put it on, more than 10 years after it came out.

In fact, about a year ago, it was putting that song on that pushed me through the last part of one of my last laps in an endurance race.

Long-time followers of my work know that holding our mortality sensibly and visibly in our lives is a part of the work I do with my clients, and the way I live my life.

Remembering that we only get to live - as far as we know - one life on this planet.

At least, by almost any belief system, we only get this life once.

Bring that to mind: remind ourselves that - as one of my clients once said - if we’re here, we might as well do something.

Remember that we may never get to see that person again, so maybe we should finally say the thing we’ve been wanting to say.

But the inverse is true, too.

Our sense of aliveness can be as much a call to arms as our sense of impermanence.

We’re still alive.

No matter how things are going…

No matter how far away they may seem from what we want…

There’s always somewhere for us to go.

As long as we’re still alive.

There’s a plant on my windowsill.

My wife got it for me as a present.

She specifically got me a plant that hardly needs watering, because of my record of failing to nurture plants.

And after a few years, I realised it was gone.

Even this hardy little creature couldn’t cope with my neglect.

I left the pot there, reminding me of the gift and the love that it showed.

And then, a few months ago, my wife was tending to the plants in our house and she decided to clear the pot away.

And when she did, in the process of throwing away the soil, she found something.

A bulb and root system, still alive.

Not. Dead. Yet.

She repotted it, and to our delight - it has grown.

As I look at it now, it is taller than it ever was before, sprouting from the soil in four places.

Looking resplendent.

Somehow more inspiring now than before, having come back from the very brink.

Having held itself alive in the soil, almost empty of nutrients, short on water.

Holding itself there, against the small chance that something might change, with the small, evolutionary drive that, yes: it could get better, because it wasn’t dead yet.

It took the perfect conditions, the simple twist of fate, the moment of Kairos, for it to revive.

But those things came to pass.

And if you are sitting, marooned on a island…

Or languishing in dry soil…

Losing hope, or fearing your time may be done, that there is no way on…

Remember that it only takes one moment.

One chance encounter.

One stranger’s kindness.

And everything can change.

And maybe in months, or years, or decades you will be bigger and more resplendent than anyone could ever have imagined.

Some more inspiring for what you have been through.

We have no idea what we may become.

And as long as we alive, the possibilities are wide.

But only if we hang in there.

Only if we stay alive.

—

PS My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose

This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.