Sunday Serenity

Good Sunday evening to everyone out there in the Cadre sphere. I am happy to be here with you, coming from my car again, doing a little bit of traveling. My name is Jason Lennox, and if you haven't been here before, I am your resident recovery champion. So I am here to talk about everything related to recovery, which includes mental health, which includes wellness in general. I just think overall wellness is a great way to look at recovery, and I believe that most of us are in, or could be in a version of recovery from something, whether that's mental health struggles, substances, other addictions, things like that.

So that's a little bit about who I am. And I am here to talk to you through my series Sunday Serenity, which, as it sounds, happens on Sunday and really is geared toward things and stories and habits and practices that keep us in a state of serenity, because I believe that when I am in a state of serenity and I have a serene life, there's a lot less of a chance of me resorting to other things that maybe aren't so healthy. So I think serenity is a key component to all of our health and especially in the world of recovery.

So I am traveling a little bit today because I came down, I drove about an hour and 20 minutes, hour and a half to a. Good evening, Alec. Good to see you. Good to see others. But I came down for a funeral. It was actually a guy that I didn't know that well, knew a little bit, but was close enough with his family and his brothers. He was a year younger than I am. He's 36, and he passed away, really a sad thing, way too young again. I was close to his family, made the trip venture down here, and these kinds of things always make me reflect a little bit on what life is about and where I'm at and what I've done, and, you know, what kind of.

What kind of state I'll leave this world in and the others around me. And so I'm coming down here, and I think about that a lot. And I believe wholeheartedly that the things in my life, and actually have a quote in my book, my memoir, and it's an original quote from me. And it goes like, something like, the value of my life should be measured by the value that I added to the collecting, especially when someone's 36. Right? We just don't know. We just don't know. This guy wasn't supposed to be gone.

So we're at this little church, and I'm at the funeral, and one of the things that struck me about it was there was no eulogy. There was nobody that really got up and shared anything about him. Like, what was shared about him was what was in the obituary. And, you know, then the rest was just a normal course of action for a funeral. And I always find that, at least for me, on the receiving end, and I've also shared eulogies. Those are some of the most powerful moments of funerals, of celebrations, where people get to get up and share, by the way, if you're watching this or this gets captured in the universe forever, and there comes a day when my funerals out there know that a eulogy, I would just want.

I would be fine if my entire funeral was eulogies, because that really, like, that is celebrating people, when you can get people up there and share, you know, really neat stories and really powerful experiences that people have of us. And so it was just struck me that there was nobody that didn't happen. And that's maybe just the way in which the family wanted it, maybe that's just the particular faith, so no harm, no foul. But it got me thinking about a time that I read. I read an article, an article by Jack Rains, who's a financial guy and a business guy, but he was referencing, actually, Warren Buffet, in an event he was at, when Warren said, I believe everybody should write their own obituary.

Told everyone at the conference, I believe you should walk away from here, go home, write your own obituary. Because if you do that, then you'll have something to work backward from. Excuse me. I remember I was going on a retreat. This is last June, and I had read that just before, and I thought, you know, that's something I'm going to put some time into. But then I thought, an obituary says, this is where I'm from. This is how old I was. This is who my family was, who preceded me in death, who I left behind.

And so I went a little bit deeper and decided I was going to write my own eulogy. I'm 37. I don't want to sound morbid. It's nothing like that. But there's something about that and about living in that space and understanding and reflecting on what will it be like when I'm not here, when I'm at the end of the road. I would rather do that now than do that when it's too late or when I'm very close. And then I'm thinking about all the things I could have, should have, would have done. So I decided to write my own eulogy.

And I actually went hiking for 4 hours just to kind of clear my head and get myself in a position and start to think about what are the things that I would want? What are the things I would want people to say about me and about my life? At a funeral. At my funeral. And I speak wonder. It's good to have you here. As always, I narrowed it down to three things. I always loved the number three. I think it's just easy. It's simple, not too much, but gives us a little variety. And so the three things that I realize, and by the way, I would love to hear your three things, maybe even just think of one.

But when you think about somebody sharing from a stage, from the podium, about you and about your life and about what you would want to be remembered for, you hear those. We've all heard them. What are the three things that you would want them to say? That is what mattered most to this person. And for me, I knew it was very simple. And again, I do some of this work, and I reflect on this a lot. So it was easy for me to come up with three things. Family, integrity, generosity. Family, integrity, generosity.

I would love for you to drop last week, we had a lot of interaction with people dropping in the comments would love that. Again here. Start firing away here and tell me, what are the one, two, three things that if you had to listen to your own eulogy, somebody talking about you at your funeral, what are the three things you would want people to remember you by? And so I did that. Family, integrity and generosity, and what that allowed me to do, and I expanded on that a little more, of course. Like, what was it about family?

What was it about integrity? What was it about generosity? It really was a deep exercise that actually took some emotion. It took some energy. It was a little bit hard. I got to the end, and I thought, okay, I'm not doing this. I have that somewhere. So again, if there comes a day where, you know, any of you happen to be attending a funeral of mine, dig deeply into my Google Drive and you'll find it. Anyhow, point is, the Warren Buffet recommendation was to write an obituary. And I just, I felt like that was surface level, that wasn't going to get to who I was, what I wanted to be, what I wanted to be remembered for, what I wanted people to feel about me, feel from me, feel with me.

And so I decided to write a eulogy and came up with family, integrity, and generosity as three things forever that I would want to be known. And I try to do those the best of my ability today. And so, you know, again, this exercise, I felt in tune with, in sync with speak. Wonder says she built bridges between people. What a beautiful thing. So many people and so many bridges. I love that. So many bridges that we need in this world, because we have people that are over here and we have people that are over here.

I like to do that a lot. How do we play in the middle and understand that we just really all need to come together? And Alec, kind, passionate, honest. I love that. Honest, honesty, kindness, passion, those things are going to take us a long way. And guess what? When we're at the end of the road and when we're lying in our beds in the final days and final months, hopefully we have time to reflect on those things and it doesn't happen suddenly. Those are the things that leave the plate clean, right?

If I can be honest and I can be kind to people and I can, I can use that passion, chances are I'm not going to have nearly as many regrets. Speakwonder says she sent good ripples out. Again, I love where you're coming up with these things, building bridges, sending all the good ripples out. These are the things. So I bring all this up because I would love for you, those of you watching, those of you who will be watching, to take this exercise on. Everybody has kind of shared a couple things, or a few of you have shared a couple things, a few things.

Dive deeper into that. What does that mean? What does it mean? What was kindness like in Alec's life? What was passion like in Alec's life? How did honesty play out? How did people around Alec feel those things about him and from him and with him and through him? And again, it was just such a fascinating exercise for me, and I believe these eulogies, I will say it one more time. If you happen to be a part of funeral planning for me, make sure that you leave at least an hour for people to get. I know we all have things to do, but that's where the magic is at for me when we're listening.

And you get the people up there who really talk about what we embodied and what we did in this world, there's so much emotion in that. There's so much power. And this is like the last time to celebrate those things, at least, like, officially thinking about the person on the planet. We have memories and we do those things. But I just love that. I love the eulogy. I love reading them. I love hearing them. And so I just ask you, I'll urge you to this week, think about those things. Take those three things and expand on them.

Speak wonder as another one. She arrived on the planet curious and left. Inspired. Boom. I love it, love it, love it. And. And then left. Inspired. But also left. Other people. Inspired. Right. We could just keep going down this path. So take a few things. Think about that. I know it may be, on the surface, concern, morbid that we're writing eulogies for ourselves, but it was such a beautiful exercise, and it gives me something to family. This is almost a year later, and it didn't, I didn't have to go back and look.

Family, integrity, generosity. Those are the three more. And we could come up with, like, a dozen, 20 of these things. Right. It was hard work.