Week 5 - Bonus - Conscious Living - When Life Punches You in the Face

All right, ladies and gentlemen, it is week five, bonus week for Cadre as we approach the end of this march. And we begin the end right of the first quarter, 2025. My goodness. The title of this talk is what happens when life punches you in the face. Now, I just want to be really clear. I have gotten punched in the face. In fact, it's been a while since I've gotten punched in the face, and I'm very grateful for that. But a friend of mine got punched in the face, and I'm watching how his family's dealing with it, and I'm watching how a lot of us who care about him are dealing with it.

And then that's actually brought me to other people who've got punched in the face because they. Well, so let's just be. Let me just start by saying. So this guy was on vacation with his family and ended up having a seizure. The seizure led to the identification of a brain tumor, and the brain tumor identified brain cancer. And he's been getting treatment for the last six weeks of this brain cancer. And it's like, a lot, you know, and he had his last one yesterday. I got this here, you know, this little bracelet for brain cancer.

Because gray matters, right? That's good, isn't it? Gray matters. And, you know, it's kind of like, it was a lot. It was a lot. And I'm watching his two little girls, not super little, right? 10 and 13 or something like that, 10 and 14, navigate this, the wife navigate this, him navigate this. Watching all that, watching how the community, especially the recovery community, is surrounding him and loving him and supporting him with all kinds of things. And it makes me think, like, wow, what a blessing to have a community.

Because the truth is, like, a lot of us get punched in the face now. Sometimes it feels like life is just like punching you in the face over and over. And at some point, you kind of have to ask yourself, like, what is this about, man? Like, how much of this can be traced to me and my behavior? But sometimes, like, I don't know, man. I don't think there's any behavior that really causes a brain tumor, brain cancer, you know, so. So then it's kind of like, well, what do we do? You know? How do you respond?

And so the quote comes from Mike Tyson, right? The quote is, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. And so life is just going along, and you think, hey, I got my job, I got my family, I got my wife. I've been having some difficulties with my wife and, you know, just normal kind of stuff, Just conflicts and challenges, maybe not communicating as well as we could. And then, bam, you get punched. And everything is different. And yet it's not different because, like, our mortality is always on the table.

We just don't think it is. But, like, for him, I. I don't know if I'm supposed to. Break. Break. What's it called? Whatever. Break. Focus. Always nice to see, speak, wonder here. Look, like the truth is our mortality is always on the table, but we're just. We move along. We just do our thing and we think, like, it's just gonna keep going that way. This guy is 46, 47, and he has now finished the radiation, finished the chemo. And now the question is, like, what's going on with the tumor? Because he already had the surgery that removed as much of the tumor as they could find, Find and see, which was very good.

The doctor's very optimistic about what's happening, but at the same time, it's glioblastoma, which is not, you know, not a great diagnosis. Here's the thing. One of the agreements in this community that's been supporting this guy has been we're not going to talk about what could happen. We're not going to pretend that we know what's going to happen, and we're not going to go negative. And so, like, we. His community, we've been able to do that. His family, extended family, not as. Not as able. And on top of that, he's found himself in the situation where, like, sometimes the extended family want him to take care of them, which, you know, they're not doing anything to be mean and they're not doing anything.

They're just not consciously doing it. Right. They're just not paying attention. But there's no question that he and his family got punched in the face. And, you know, the things that you have to do is you have to learn to roll with things. I mean, you have to. I mean, look, there are. There are people out there, and it's heartbreaking, and it makes no sense. The ones who, like, they just. They get punched in the face and they've got. They don't have anybody, or they don't think they have anybody, and they go through it alone.

And going through that stuff alone is tough. And so the first thing when life punches us in the face, right, is to really take stock of the people in our lives and to have the ability and the humility to rally the troops. And sometimes the troops just rally themselves and Sometimes you gotta push a little bit. But the truth is, the vast majority of us are alone only if we choose to be. The vast majority of us have to do things on our own only if we choose to. And it's that horrible, horrible, horribly challenging process of asking for help and accepting help that we have to learn how to do.

Because when life punches you in the face and all your plans on how things were going to go changes, you need a board of directors to help you totally change the direction of the business, totally change the direction that the ship is going, and see if I can mix any more metaphors. So it's been amazing watching my friend navigate this and really kind of just like, see, like, how do I do this? And the beautiful thing is he has a mentor sponsor who's like, hey, you don't have to do brain cancer perfectly.

And guess what? You don't have to know what you're doing because you've never done it before. And that's a beautiful thing, too, right? Plenty of room for mistakes, plenty of room for growth, plenty of room for so much. So I know there's gonna come a time life is gonna punch me in the face. I hope it's not soon. You never know, because again, your mortality is always on the. Just don't think it is. Maybe life is going to try to punch you in the face and you can duck. Maybe sometimes it hits you square in the jaw.

Maybe it knocks the wind out of you and maybe you just have to take a knee. I don't know how it all works. And the best way to navigate it all, I'm just so grateful I don't have to do it alone. On that note, happy great weekend, everybody.