“Stop And Smell The Roses”

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Recently, someone at my allotment site died, due to cancer.  I walked past his plot today and it made me think of him.

“Stop and smell the roses“

This is a phrase that we are all familiar with.  It simply means that we should take time to appreciate something we have, or to pay attention to the good things that happen right under our noses.

If we are all honest, how often can we say, that we do actually ‘sit back and smell the roses’ ourselves.  I would put money on it, that it’s not that often.

Life is so so busy now for everyone.  Time goes so quickly and we are all trying to get ‘this and that’ finished, before we go on to the next ‘this and that’.

Today I did sit back and smell the roses:

Remember my wild flowers?  You can read about my wild flower patch here.

My wildflower patch today

They are still flowering beautifully and there are so many insects still flying around.  So much activity is going on, it takes my breath away to just stand still and watch it.

I feel very privileged to be able to just ‘stop and stare’, especially on such a beautiful sunny morning.

We chose for me to give up work, when our first daughter was born.  This was very scary at the time, as money was a big issue.  But looking back, I am very proud of how we managed.  We have two beautiful daughters and a nice home.  It doesn’t have posh furniture or the latest gadgets, but it is a ‘home’, where we have shared so many happy memories together.

What we didn’t realise when I gave up working and our so called ‘luxuries’, was how much happiness it would bring.

In fact, looking back at our old life, ‘keeping up with the Jones’ gave us a ‘carousel’ life, that just went round and round:

‘We worked hard to pay for new gadgets and expensive holidays and worked more hours to pay for the gadgets and expensive holidays, we brought more things, worked more hours, became more in debt, so we worked more hours and took a bank loan to pay off the credit cards and then had another expensive holiday, bought more gadgets etc. etc.’

  All the time we thought the holidays and new gadgets etc would make us happy, but if they made us so happy, then why did we keep on spending money on more and more things?  The carousel would never have stopped if we hadn’t made that life changing decision, for me to give up my job and we would never have known about the surprising benefits.

Do I have any regrets?…  NO.  If we had the chance to go back in time, with the same circumstances and the same money coming in, we would live exactly the same.

When I reach those pearly gates, my only regret is that I didn’t meet my husband earlier and lived this life with him sooner.

My blog was a little bit different today.   I hope you still enjoyed reading it.