I cannot believe that it is already the 4th of March today. Time certainly has just flown AGAIN this year. More than anything, I am surprised as I have spent all of this time at home. I have obviously been industriously working away at my ME degree. I don’t seem to have accomplished much that I can measure at all and yet I am far less stressed, in fact probably as stressed as I ever was at university (i.e not much at all). I also have a bank of knowledge in areas that I have always dreamt about. I am fitter than I have been in years and I am starting to surf a little better. But more importantly, I am starting to rediscover my wife and my children and this is the most amazing gift!.

Last week I had a typical old me experience. An old friend of mine from Johannesburg phoned me up at 19h00 on Wednesday evening. He said he was in Cape Town and did I not want to join him for dinner. My immediate response was no thanks bud, and then included any of these excuses, too tired, long drive tomorrow, already made dinner, already eaten more than two average men, the wife excuse, yada, yada, yada. I put the phone down and gave it some thought. Here was a good friend of mine in town whom I had not seen in ages and I was making every excuse under the sun as I did not feel like driving 45 minutes to Cape Town. After chatting to my wife I realised that I do not actually have a job and yet I am behaving like a stressed old man. And so it was that I found myself in my car driving to Cape Town with the Pet Shop Boys beat reverberating through my brain.

I had dinner again in a wonderful little Thai place that I had never seen before. I had a jungle curry (or something like that) and it was rather warm. So warm that I had to go and blow my nose three times during dinner. It was infernal and phenomenal. I also had desert, ice cream, mainly to cool down the molten lump of lava that was my tongue. The evening was a wonderful meeting of minds and deep soulful discussion. It was awesome and I got home just past late o clock.

I almost missed the whole experience though. I wondered how many incredible experiences I have missed as a result of my tiredness or some other silly excuse. Is it possible that there is a whole other life out there if I just made different choices every day? Obviously not all experiences are going to be as insightful and uplifting as this one but surely a number of bad ones are worth the possibility of an awesome one. The disappointing thing is that one of my motto’s for this year is to put myself out there at every opportunity, and already in February I have been found wanting!

Time for me to get out there and do life!