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A little over a year ago my wife and I had our joint 40th birthday party.
I made a joke in my speech.
Referencing the varying distances people had travelled.
“From those who could’ve just walked over two fields to get here to Matt who’s flown in especially from near Wuhan, dodging Coronavirus as he came”.
Oh how we laughed.
As far as we know Smudgey (as me and the lads generally call him) didn’t actually bring any COVID into the country.
He had it a few months later so we’re fairly sure this isn’t all his fault.
He’s accepted 50:50 responsibility with Boris 😂
Anyway, it was really nice to see Smudgey.
We lived together at Uni in the second and third year.
Jonny, Benny, Danny and Matty as people sometimes referred to us.
But we don’t see him much.
He’s predilection for Asian ladies has led him to spend most of the last 20 years working in different parts of the Far East.
That and his job, I suppose.
Chicken and egg.
Even when he lived in London he’d randomly disappear for weeks on end.
To the point where a rumour was started (by us) that “There is no Smudge”.
He’d never existed and was a figment of our imagination.
It even got to the point where that saying appeared on camera on a giant flag some of the lads took to the 2010 World Cup.
Which possibly trumped the 2006 “Peters Monkey” one aimed at Ciaran.
And I’ll never forget the look on Smudgey’s face when the ‘There is no Smudge’ flag dropped from the ceiling as he was about to start his Best Man speech at Dan’s wedding (see accompanying photo).
Proof, if ever it were needed, that there is no Smudge.
You know what else there isn’t?
Or what we could consider doesn’t exist?
Failure.
It’s something the human brain is easily tempted to think does.
But does it?
Often when we feel we’ve “failed” it’s because we haven’t achieved some essentially made up standard we’ve set.
A dividing line between success and failure that we’ve not far off plucked from nowhere.
If there even is a line at all.
Maybe just a vague notion.
When we feel we’ve “failed” with our eating, what’s actually happened?
Did we have a concrete definition of what “success” looked like?
Probably not.
Even if we did, does the fact that we didn’t quite hit that mean than “writing it off” and going even further away from that make any sense at all?
It’s easy to think anything other than perfection is failure.
We don’t hit our financial targets for the year and we’ve failed.
Essentially forgetting all the money we have made.
We don’t hit that PB on a run or an exercise of some sort and forget the huge progress we’ve made just because that exact number didn’t happen.
We miss one workout and decide it’s not worth doing any as we can’t now do the five that week we’d originally planned.
None of these are failure.
They are degrees of success.
Can’t achieve the ideal degree of success?
Achieve the next best thing.
Or the next best.
The best you realistically think you can under the circumstances.
Never forget that, like Smudge, “there is no failure”.
Just degrees of success!
Much love,
Jon ‘My first real indicator that something bad was on it’s way was Dan’s 40th on March 6th where everyone was foot shaking or doing the Wuhan Elbow’ Hall