"The best laid plans..." or To a Mouse

or 

To Robin.

A quote often quoted, by Robin, and others, and perhaps a fitting reminder on this day of tribute and remembrance. My plans to note the day today were meant to be grand, and yet I sit at home in reflection rather than traipsing across the Khumbu Valley paying homage in the Climbers’ Memorial. At this point I want to give a huge shout out to Jemma and Rich, great friends of Robin and I, who have made an epic tribute to Robin this past weekend. Both have "Everest-ed" in their households by climbing the height of Everest on the stairs. They have also been raising funds for charity during their feat. The links to their donation pages are below. Check them out! I'm super proud of both of them for creating and completing this challenge. 

Jemma's fundraising page

Rich's fundraising page

Instead I’ve chosen to share my reflections with you in this published way. 

The quote “the best laid plans” are in reference to the poem “To a Mouse” from the poet, Robert Burns. Here is the quote in English translation from the original Scottish version.

“The best-laid schemes of mice and men

Go often askew, 

And leave us nothing but grief and pain, 

For promised joy!”

Robert Burns, 1785

How fitting in tribute by adding the next two lines for consideration. With all the best intentions set out, many of us have been left with grief and pain, continuously flowing and ebbing, and eventually fading over the months. For some, it is likely that this grief and pain will never fully dissolve. For others, our lives rebuild, old relationships are strengthened and new  and fulfilling relationships are formed. Relationships with memories. Relationships with others. All built on our experience of loss. All built on our experience with you, Robin.

Robin, rest well. You are remembered; and not only on this anniversary. 

As what often happens with a poignant piece of prose I encounter, it takes me much later to understand the full and deeper significance of the piece of work. 

 “The best-laid schemes…” quote, often mis-quoted, and likely misinterpreted through nonchalance or whim.. Such as: “… best laid plans, and all that 🤷…” echoing a “meh” for recognizing that a change has had to occur due to some unforeseen circumstance. I am certainly guilty of this downplay; however, perhaps the sentiment remains the same from the deeper to the surface meaning of the quote.

To understand the deeper meaning, the next block of the poem is essential.

“Still you are blessed, and compared with me!

The present only touches you:

But oh! I backward cast my eye,

On prospects dreary!

And forward, though I cannot see,

I guess and fear!”

With the local event of the loss of Robin one year ago, and the global, ever evolving event of this epidemic we are all facing at the moment, I find this next block of the poem a fitting reminder to live in the present, rather than to re-live the past and fear the future. One is blessed when they can stop looking drearily on past events, as well as choosing to not be fearful of the future.

EVERYONE has experienced “the best-laid schemes” over the past year.

How we are choosing to face into these plans, ripped up and tossed in the wind, PLUS whichever shitty life events are also happening (cancer, job loss, isolation, separation, etc), I find this block of prose to be a reminder about grounding and taking control of what you can control- You. In this exact moment. That is it. That is all. You cannot even control the moment as a whole, rather only your reaction to the present in which you sit. 

Be equipped with the tool of grace to notice what you are experiencing and which door you choose to open next. Be flexible and challenge your natural modus operandi if progress is what you yearn for. 

Those of you who wish to plan, will naturally continue to do so. Plan and plan and plan and you will be prepared to seize the moment with the ever-sharpened tools within your tool box.

Those of you who wish to accept the moment as it comes, are well grounded and skilled in adaptation to allow yourselves to cope with the downward strikes that you encounter. 

In whichever camp you identify, you are united. Others are feeling the same way. Others have dealt with the same emotions… from times far before Burns’ creation of To a Mouse. 

Unite in your grief and share what you are experiencing.

As an individual, find solidarity. I continuously find life lessons to teach me that individualism is not as strong as the summation of support from willing others. 

Change is inevitable. Acceptance is your unlocking key. 

Okay, I’ve entirely oversimplified this last point, but maybe in another year I will be able to verbosely elaborate. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_a_Mouse

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43816/to-a-mouse-56d222ab36e33

Introducing... Seven Summits Snacks

At the very start of the year, someone I am rather fond of asked me one of the best questions I have ever been asked: “choose one word to describe your 2020”. It took me a little while to choose wisely, but in the end, I chose the word: ambitious!

To my regular readers, you won’t be surprised at this response with the marathon (literally and figuratively) race calendar I had already described for the first half of the year: Tokyo, Boston, Everest. Subsequently due to the world crisis, Tokyo has long since been cancelled and Boston and Everest are both postponed... where it will not be possible to run both this year.

No 6-star medal this year, a dream I had excitedly thought was to be a sure thing for 2020.  However, in reference to “well, that wasn’t in the plan” and trying to build a life with certainty within it, I find myself yet again wondering what worldly life lessons I meant to be learning... I suppose it has something to do with my tendency to want to make a plan to get ahead of the game (of life) somehow. 

Anyways... What I deeply describe as my most “ambitious” task for they year is NOT the three marathons in three months, nor that the last marathon would have started at an altitude with half of the amount of available oxygen as a “normal” marathon after an 8 day/ 60km acclimatization trek in... no, I was not even phased about completing those tasks because for some reason (obviously based on past experiences), they feel like perfectly natural and safe progression patterns. 

Although these three races did form part of my initial answer to describing my ambitious year ahead, and with running not actually the most ambitious task in my mind, what warrants the description of ambitious?

Instead, moving on with life in the “normal” sense is! Which is driven mainly by me trying to carve out a successful chocolate consulting business AND launch Seven Summit Snacks. THESE are the two tasks that I find deserving of the word “ambitious”. These are the two tasks that have the most unknowns to me. These are the tasks with the biggest personal risk, causing me to stretch outside of my comfort zone. 

Living in the space of uncertainty around where your next pay check is actually coming from is terrifying to many people. Trusting that you have the ability and skills and hustle to put food on your plate and pay your rent when you don’t actually have a physical contract is the epitome of the concept of blind trust in yourself and the universe. Ambition in this sense is of the definition to have “intended to satisfy high aspirations and (is) therefore difficult to achieve”.  Okay!! I get it!!

My aspirations are high! They always have been, and when I have achieved what would have been an aspiration, I am naturally looking to what is next, bigger, better. Having the opportunity to try this (chocolate) out for myself, without the safety net of a large corporation, is a leap that not many can make when they have the security of a pension, benefits, regular pay check, etc. But for my own personal values, I knew I would be doing a disservice to myself by taking a corporate job in a location away from my family, or else a job near to my family in an industry I am not passionate about. A heartfelt door closed in my life and several exciting, new ones opened. I have chosen to walk through those doors. I’ve given myself a period of time to make it work, where I will rationally evaluate if I need to jump back on the safety bandwagon or not, but at that point I will know deep down that I tried my best. 

So what makes 2020 the year of ambition to me? Queue one of the official unveilings of Seven Summits Snacks!

I, and my two other co-founders, have started a chocolate business! 

We are official (only official businesses have websites, apparently), with a national incorporation and everything!

How are we making this happen? 

Well, somehow we just are!

We are not starting completely from scratch as many entrepreneurs who we have connected with over the past month are. I have worked in the industry at a global scale for the past 10 years (again, this seems to be more experience than most new start-ups), and Leanna has often been my muse for new product developments. My family as a whole has always had some of the first tastes of the work-in-progress (without context, of course). Our third co-founder is a new business strategist who now gets to put into effect her years of training.

In effect, Leanna came to me with the consumer problem; empathetically I thought this problem was solvable; and from there we have been ideating, prototyping, and testing steadily over the past months. Good product development is rooted in Design Thinking. 

We now have a range of products visualized and are currently working out how to make scalable, sale-able product for the summer! We will test your tastebuds and we will also take your monies- as investment cash, and by the end of this year, for product. We endeavour to build a Kickstarter platform in the next little while as we work out our supply chain. 

I won’t go into more detail than that right now as future blogs will warrant details and specifics of the how. I will however leave you with our website to peruse which introduces our story and products.

I will closeout though, with a note on grace.

For Christmas, Leanna gave me a hoodie with the word Grace and the following note:

"To the best big sister ever... I love you so much, you have been my saving grace this year. Your strength is courageous..."

I was deeply touched by her note as grace is a value I have long held on a pedestal, aspiring to have embedded within my daily life. An ambition, of sorts. And to be regarded as someone else's saving grace is a great compliment. Since then, and of course as I seem to come to many epiphanies of sorts through podcasts, I listened to a Tony Robbins podcast about the gift of Grace.

“Grace is not something you earn. It’s not a reward, or something you pray or ask for. And it has nothing to do with karma, or your past actions. You don’t deserve grace – it just falls on you.

What’s remarkable about grace is that the more you acknowledge it, the more it appears. Grace can be a guiding force when your intent is pure and your will is strong, but something else pushes you through.”

I had previously recognized that grace is about acknowledgment rather than  wanting or earning or deserving, thus resonating with the sentiment. I can honestly say that I am here today because of accepting what has befallen me over the past 15 months. Rather than list all of the negative events I have experienced, where one of these events often causes people to spiral into a depression, I choose to acknowledge where I am today because of these events. I choose to be grateful that I am healthy, happy, and alive. With that, I welcome what challenges are still yet to come, and whichever life lessons I have yet to learn.

In this time of global difficulty, I invite you to invite grace into your life; to be grateful you are where you are when you are, and to be creative and open to the doors that are opening in front of you. If you look, you will see them. Be brave and use this opportunity in front of you.