Wake Up, Human

Ep.18: Forget "Retirement Age"— Let's Live Fully Now. [In Memory of a Friend]

• Shannon M. Wills

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In this episode I reflect on the passing of a dear friend, exploring what it means to live fully while we have the chance, and the ways in which our lives create meaningful ripples in the world, beyond the simple moments we live.

When my friend Susan died of cancer just months after retiring, it invited me to confront some shadowy subjects, including the question, why do we postpone joy?

Susan was a mentor and friend who helped spark the birth of Wake Up, Human, cheering me on to step into my voice and speak up. She was deeply kind, quietly strong, and secretly sparky. The speed of her illness—from diagnosis to hospice in mere weeks—underscores life's fragility, and the importance of living and loving while we have the chance. 

Through Susan's story, I explore how we're all connected in a vast web of relationships. Every interaction ripples outward in ways we cannot fully comprehend. Who you meet, what you say and do, how you live your life—it all matters. 

This retirement age milestone isn't natural or traditional—it's an industrial revolution invention that trains us to delay fulfillment for decades. The "industrial mindset" keeps us spinning on life's hamster wheel, too busy to make these vital connections. But stepping off that wheel is radical—and necessary.

In Susan's honor, I'm changing how I approach this podcast and life itself. Don't wait until retirement to pursue what lights you up. Tell people you love them while you have the chance. And as Howard Thurman said, "Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Shannon W.:

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 18 of the Wake Up Human podcast. This episode marks a new year. It marks a new moment in my life and the life of the podcast, I think, and it also marks an opportunity for me to say goodbye to a dear friend of mine. In this episode, I'll be sharing some thoughts and reflections in memoriam in honor of my dear friend, susan, who recently passed. I'll be sharing on living a fulfilled life while we have the chance and on the value that every one of us brings to life. Come on in and join me and live life fully with me while we've got it. Huh, how about that? Welcome to the wake up human podcast.

Shannon W.:

I'm shannon wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Hello everyone, and happy belated new year Happy in bulk for those of you who celebrate that beautiful Celtic holiday.

Shannon W.:

I am just back from a trip to Ecuador. I was there for almost three weeks and wow, I just have to say wow. The trip blew my mind and healed my heart in a number of ways and I'm going to be sharing some of that with you, I'm sure, in future episodes. But today I'm not talking about Ecuador. I'm going to be talking about a friend of mine who just passed and sharing some words that I hope will honor her and her spirit and her memory. So I'm going to jump into that shortly A tribute to my dear friend Susan. Before I do, I just want to mention a couple of things. One of them is that, as this is a new year, I actually have some new plans for the podcast and I hope you will come along with me for the ride.

Shannon W.:

So, without saying too much about what it is, you know the podcast has generally been an interview podcast and I love the interviews, I love the people I've interviewed and I love the conversations we've had, and I'm also feeling called at this point to really just step into my own voice and my own messaging and to use the podcast as a platform for that, and what that is probably going to look like is shorter episodes. It's going to be probably less polished, which I consider a good thing. I think we try a little too hard to be polished in our world these days. We can equate something highly polished with something valuable, and I don't think that's always true. So I'm going to be just speaking about topics that touch my heart, sharing stories and things that I want to teach, for a lack of a better word. I want to be able to share and teach and guide a bit with some of my experiences, and I want to be confident in my voice that I can use this platform to do this, that I don't need someone else as an interviewee to bring value to the podcast, and I'm excited about the things I'm going to bring. The episodes will still be aligned with the themes of Wake Up Human. I still think you'll enjoy them and benefit from them and I hope you will and I want to try to put an episode out every week.

Shannon W.:

This is one of the reasons I want to do this, because as long as I'm spending my time looking for interview subjects and having conversations with them and scheduling with them and interviewing them and editing that and putting it together. That's a lot of work and it's not really what I intended for this podcast in the first place. What I intended was to have it be an outlet to really reach people and to be able to just jump on and share what is on my mind and on my heart while it's fresh and while it's real. And putting out an episode every week and holding myself to that feels like a potent way to keep sharing my voice, to practice sharing my voice and to put out more content, and I mean that in the most positive way. I guess it's not just to crank something out, but actually it's the opposite of that. It's that I don't want to be afraid to put something out because it becomes precious because there are so few of them.

Shannon W.:

I follow some podcasters who just put something out every week and they hop on and they speak from their hearts and they put out something that is fresh and in the moment and real and authentic to them and it's helpful. It's helpful to me. So why should I think that me recording myself speaking about something from my heart that feels relevant and real and authentic? Why would I think that that couldn't be helpful to someone else. So look for a change to the podcast weekly episodes just me talking for the time being, but I do plan to still call people in for interviews because I love them. So I'm not stepping aside from that, just making a little bit of change. So this is the first episode that's going to follow that format, and I've been toying with the idea of when to jump in to this new weekly format, and when I heard that my friend Susan had passed, it was really on my heart to jump on and talk about her, and so that was a sign for me.

Shannon W.:

This is the moment Do this for Susan, because she deserves it. So my friend Susan Schmickel passed away on January 11, and she had cancer. A couple of months ago she had no idea she had cancer and then over a couple of days, a couple of weeks, she started feeling unwell and sicker and sicker and she knew something was going wrong and she went to the doctor and she found out that she had stage four cancer. When I heard from her about this diagnosis it was last fall I want to say it was September or October and by November she was in hospice. So this happened very quickly and then I just heard this week that Susan passed last um on January 11, from her illness. So the reason I want to talk about Susan, besides the fact that she's a fabulous friend, is that she was instrumental in wake up human, coming into existence.

Shannon W.:

I met Susan about seven years ago, I would say, and we were in a women's group and sort of a mastermind that we fell into together and befriended one another and then we sort of fell out of one another's lives for a couple of years. We sort of fell out of one another's lives for a couple of years and then, back in 2020, susan reached out to me and asked me if I would be interested to be a mentee of hers. She was working as a guide in a program called Purpose Guides with Jonathan Gustin. If you'd be interested, you can look up what that program is and Susan was training as a guide for that program. And she reached out to me and said would you be interested to be one of my practice clients, where we're going to be looking at what is the soul's purpose in this world and how can we live into it? And if you know me at all, you know that there's no way that I could say no to someone asking me if I wanted to be a trainee in learning what my soul's purpose is. So I said absolutely yes to Susan and from then on she became a mentor of mine and going through that purpose guides slash, soul purpose process really pushed me to start using my voice in a more public way, and the podcast is one emanation of that exploration. So, susan, I can't say I wouldn't have had the podcast without Susan, but it's possible. It's possible. So I'm thanking you, susan, for the impact that you had on my life, not only on getting the podcast out into the world, but helping me to step more fully into my confidence and my voice.

Shannon W.:

Susan is older than me. She's at least a generation older than me. She just retired, oh gosh, a year or two ago, and so she's in her mid-60s. This is too young to go. We all know that she had a lot of life left to live. She had a lot of life left that she wanted to live when she retired. She had some dreams. She's a big science fiction fan and she wanted to write a science fiction book. She started writing it actually, and I think she got pretty far. She also wanted to do some permaculture and some rock gardening and she had some beautiful visions for the kind of spaces that she wanted to create around her and the kind of life that she wanted to step into in her retirement.

Shannon W.:

She didn't make it very far into that retirement and sadly, this is something that we see so many times, isn't it? Have you not seen this? Someone retires and within a year or two they're gone. Why? I mean, I know there are plenty of people who retire and then they live long and fulfilled and happy lives, but it just feels so tragic when someone retires and then someone dies. I actually have a coworker from my last job who retired and literally, I think he retired in one month it was like May and the next month, june, he had a heart attack and died. What do you do with that? Well, I'll tell you what I do. I hope that that person lived fully while they were alive and I hope they didn't wait to live fully and follow their dreams. I hope they didn't wait to do that until they retired. Now, I don't think Susan did that. I think she did live some dreams, but I think she had saved some for later. I honestly do this person who I knew from work who passed a month after he retired. I'm pretty sure he was living fully the whole time, right, and so when he had that heart attack and suddenly he was gone and it was a great shock and it was sad and it was tragic and it was also like thought provoking because I thought, wow, you know what, he didn't wait till he retired to live his life, thank God.

Shannon W.:

So I guess part of what this podcast is is a little bit of a manifesto to remind all of us not to wait the idea of a retirement age that is not a human, a natural, human, traditional construct. There's no such thing as a retirement age. Retirement age is a construct that's created by our industrial revolution and the whole mindset around that, that we are on a industrial timeline in our lives right, our lives. That normally would be a life of childhood and adolescence and adulthood and parenthood and work and contribution, and then elderhood and then mentorship and growing older as parents and then grandparents, and then we could hope gracefully into our old age and death. Whereas we have this in our society, we have these sort of cutoff points where you enter into the working world after your childhood and your adolescence. You enter into your working world and then you just work and you work and you work and you work and you take your vacations when your job says you can take vacations, and you work your life around your jobs. And this might be less true as time is going on, but it's still very, very, very true, and it's certainly true for the generations that are retiring and moving into that elderhood space at this time. These generations grew up in a time where a lot of times life was put off until retirement. So we see this sort of unnatural cutoff it's like 65 years old this sort of unnatural cutoff. It's like 65 years old, 67. I'm not sure what my retirement age is, it might be 67 or higher than that. And then suddenly you get to be free, suddenly you get to live a life that is not dictated by a Monday through Friday work week or a nine to five work day or punching a clock, literally or figuratively, as your work.

Shannon W.:

Um side note, I just heard this song. I was in a store yesterday and I heard this song. I don't know who sings it because it's a country artist which I don't really follow, but it's this new song. It's called buy dirt. I think it's a new song by dirt and Luke Bryan sings on it too, and one of the one of the phrases in the song that caught my attention was do what you love and call it work. And I was like man, that's, that's good, right. And I was thinking about my family in Nebraska who are farmers and they work hard. They do work hard and there's really not a retirement age for them. It's like you're a farmer, you're a farmer and you're a farmer as long as you can farm, and there's great joy and there's great sense of self-empowerment in that Knowledge that you work the land and the land is your love and you love the land.

Shannon W.:

And extra side note here my Uncle Jim, my dear, dear Uncle Jim, who passed away in October. He was 97 years old. He was my mom's big big brother. He was born back in the 20s, the 1920s, and he passed away and he. There's a lot of stories I could tell about Uncle Jim, but the thing I want to share here is here. He is like 97 years old and he was in the hospital because he was just, he was very sick and he was falling down and he really needed that round the clock care and he just couldn't stand it, he that round the clock care, and he just couldn't stand it. He just wanted to be out on the land, he just wanted to be out on the farm.

Shannon W.:

And my cousin, nicole, was telling me that just a couple of days before he died, she took Uncle Jim out and they were out in the truck and for some reason they were eating pizza and not that you need a reason to eat pizza, it's always good but they were in their truck and they were watching the guys out there in the tractors you know Jimmy's grandson, some of the other guys, some of the other cousins. They were out there on the tractors doing their um, doing the harvest work, and Nicole said that uncle Jim was sitting there and he just had tears streaming down his face and he was eating his pizza and he was crying and he just said I'm just so happy, I'm just so happy. Just his love of that work and his love of that land was with him until the very last day. So different from like, oh, I can't wait till I'm retired, I can't wait till that day that I'm going to retire, I'm planning for it and then I'm going to be free. No, no, thank God for Uncle Jim, you know, so happy that he was so blessed.

Shannon W.:

So a couple steps back to this idea that we have this idea that the work that we love we need to find work that we love so that we don't feel like we've wasted our life by the time we get to retirement age social construct of retirement age that we can feel so much anxiety or so much lack of meaning in our lives if our work doesn't fulfill that kind of meaning for us. I think that was true for Susan because she was a computer programmer. She had a kind of a high-level computer job and it did not fulfill her soul and she found other ways to feed her soul, thank goodness. But what if that retirement age of 65 hadn't been there? I wonder what she might have done differently. So before Susan passed, when she was in hospice care, my friend Melissa and I we drove up to see her. She lives north of here in Loveland, colorado. We went up to see her and I'm so glad we visited her. We had a chance to chat and see each other and hug each other and experience her energy firsthand and tell stories and support her and shower love on her. We brought her some food and we could just tell that it brought her joy and it was a bittersweet time seeing her in pain and seeing her struggle to get up from her chair and I wouldn't change that for the world and I'm so glad we did it.

Shannon W.:

And this is to say there are times in my life where I have not gone to see someone. There've been times where people in my life, very important people, were sick and they didn't have long and I didn't prioritize enough that relationship to get myself there before they were gone. And of course I wanted to get there but I had stories like I can't, I have to wait until I have the time off work, I have to wait until I finish whatever project, assuming that they would still be there. And guess what, they might not be. And at least twice it's happened to me where I didn't make it in time and I didn't get to say goodbye and I don't want to ever do that again. Sometimes it happens, sometimes we're just we're somewhere else and there's nothing that can be done. But I've learned over time that if someone I love, someone I appreciate, someone who's meaningful to me, if they're sick, if they don't have long, if I hear about it, I'm going to go see them. I'm going to call him.

Shannon W.:

And when I got the email from Susan that she was in hospice, I immediately picked up the phone and called her and that felt like such a win to me. Such a win because my usual would be to say, oh, I got to call Susan. Gosh, this is so sad. I got to call Susan and then the day goes by and the next day goes by and I don't call. So the fact that I picked that up my phone and immediately called her, like Susan, oh my God.

Shannon W.:

And we had a really sweet conversation, that's the kind of person I want to be, and maybe it's sad or maybe it's just how it is, but sometimes we need to have losses that come in life because we didn't do that before. It becomes important enough for us to do that. So if I could share with my former self, I would say you know, like, do that now. Do that when you're 20. Start learning how to do that. Start learning how to pick up the phone, start learning how to make the phone call. Start learning how to prioritize the relationship over the work schedule or whatever it might be. And if your work schedule won't allow you to prioritize your relationships, then there's probably something you need to ask yourself about your work schedule and about your job, because what's more important? So, thank God, we went to go and see Susan.

Shannon W.:

And another thing I'm saying oh, thank God I did this is I know that Susan knew that I loved her and I know that Susan knew that how much I appreciated her as a mentor and a guide and an elder and someone who helped to open the way and show the way for me and someone who helped to open the way and show the way for me. And I had a chance to tell her that and I did. I probably told her a couple times actually, and that's another thing that I'm grateful that I did, and I just want to use this as a signpost for myself and I would also share this for anyone who's in a like this, like, if somebody means something to you, if somebody has made a difference in your life, let them know. I was fortunate enough to I don't know if fortunate is the word, but I do feel fortunate that I knew in advance that Susan was sick and I had another chance to reiterate the things that I wanted to tell her.

Shannon W.:

But that's not always the case. People pass quickly. There are accidents, people go younger than we expect, and it's not always going to be the case that we have an opportunity to tell someone thank you or to give them our love or, for that matter, to tell them we're sorry, or to ask forgiveness, or to offer forgiveness or to potentially heal a conflict those opportunities when someone dies, the opportunity to do that in the living world disappears. It's so easy to think that we can do something later, but sometimes we can't. So, man, if you've got someone in your life a mentor, a guide, a parent, a teacher, a friend, whoever, a child that you want to thank for being in your life, or you have something you want to tell them that you want to make sure they know, gosh, go tell them. Find another way to let them know how precious they are, how important they are.

Shannon W.:

It's so, it's just like a crucial thing to do as human beings. It's also a radical thing, right, because the culture has us all running so busily on the merry-go-round on the Ferris wheel of life the hamster wheel, whatever you want to call it that we literally can be quote unquote too busy to do these kinds of things. That's not right. This is something to push against. It really is something to push against.

Shannon W.:

This is, I want to call it, a colonial mindset. One of the things I'm really looking at right now is the frameworks of decolonizing our minds and our language and our culture and I'm kind of a newbie to this language around decolonizing. But I do think that this sort of colonialist, western, capitalist, materialist, individualist mindset that we're all steeped in is toxic in well in many ways, but in this particular way it's toxic in that it keeps us insulated in ourself and our particular grind to the extent that we really feel we can't get out of it. And even we can see like something going by. We're like, oh, that's something important, that's a person who's important, that's a phone call I need to make, that's something I need to do and take care of, and that's something that my heart wants to connect with another heart. And we just watch it go by. But we're like I'm spinning on the roller coaster, it's too fast, I've got too much to do, I've got the to-do list in front of me. So for us to be like, no, I'm going to jump off this right. I'm going to pick up this phone right now, in the middle of whatever I think is important, I'm going to pick up this phone and if I can't, I'm going to do it as soon as this meeting is over, whatever it is, and I'm going to connect with that thing that's so important to me. That's radical. That is saying I am not going to let the colonialist mindset, or whatever you want to call it. I want to call it the industrial mindset. I'm not going to let that be the boss of me, right? You can't be the boss of me, industrial mindset. You can't be the boss of me. You can't be the boss of my heart. So just a few more things I want to say in order to honor Susan.

Shannon W.:

You know, it's amazing how the web of connection can unfold in our lives, isn't it? This is something that my relationship with Susan really showed me. So I met her because I met someone else. I met someone else, kate Stillman, who was the teacher of the course that I took, the mastermind course, where I met Susan. Then I met Susan, and then that opened up the door to Purpose Guides and Jonathan Gustin, but also all the other people who were within that program at the same time as these trainees, like I was, and I met some other friends, including my friend Melissa, who I went with to go and visit Susan, and she was in hospice. I met new friends and new acquaintances and those will continue to be a part of my life.

Shannon W.:

This is the way the web moves. I don't even know if it's a web life. This is the way the web moves. I don't even know if it's a web, but it I mean it is, it's a. It's like a rolling, unfolding carpet right Of experience and connection, and then it also goes out in all different directions and that's what makes it a web that you know. For Susan, for example, not only did I have the blessing of this beautiful relationship with her, but then the relationships that came from that relationship and then all the ripples that will ripple out from these relationships, like who knows what will happen, for instance, between Melissa and I and that relationship. What other people might that touch? What kind of ripple might that send out into the universe, and how might that touch or change someone else in the future? We don't know. The web is too complex for us to know. But the thing is we can trust that we all matter, right. We all affect one another's lives like this. It's like the Kevin Bacon effect or whatever that's called right? Why did Kevin Bacon get chosen for this? I'm not sure, but it's like anybody.

Shannon W.:

Supposedly you could go three degrees of separation somebody I know and somebody they know and somebody they know and after three steps of that you somehow can make it to Kevin Bacon and it's funny to laugh at. Some of you may not even know who Kevin Bacon is, depending on your age, but it's funny to laugh at. But it suggests something really profound, which is that we're all connected. You know, if you go on to LinkedIn, if you're on LinkedIn, you can see like I have sometimes found someone on LinkedIn and it'll show first level of connection right, this is a direct connection with someone I personally know. And then I'll see someone else that I don't know. But they know someone I know and I want to know them and I can reach out to them if I want to and I can say, hey, I'm a friend of so-and-so and I'd really love to ask you a question. And because I know that first so-and-so, it's like I know them a little bit, and then you get out to another level and another level and another level. I'm not probably telling you anything that you don't know, but you can easily see how quickly just a couple steps of separation can connect us to people we would think would be very far away from us, whether that's Kevin Bacon or whether it's Elon Musk or something like that.

Shannon W.:

So we all affect one another's lives. Who you meet and how you affect their life matters to you and to them and to all the other lives that are touched. No life is in vain that's true anyway but we can really see like no one's life lives without touching other people's lives. No action we take doesn't matter. Every action we take matters. We're all integral parts of the world and integral parts of the web. So considering my relationship with Susan is helping me to remember this again and just find value in every single person.

Shannon W.:

There's a friend of mine from years back, nipun Mehta, who I recommend you looking up because he's a fabulous man. Nipun Mehta, he's the co-founder of Service Space, and something that he used to say probably still does is that really has stuck with me is assume value everywhere. Assume value everywhere. Don't let anyone cross your path where you think that that person doesn't matter in your life, because they do, and more so. Not just that they matter in your life, but they matter in life Everyone has value. So something else I want to say about a couple of quick things I want to say just to honor Susan, if I were to stand up at her memorial.

Shannon W.:

One thing about Susan is that one thing she did do a couple of years ago she did not wait until she retired. She wanted to be a ventriloquist and she took up ventriloquism and she got a puppet. And this puppet's name is Katie, and Katie is a hand puppet. It's hard for me to even call her a puppet because I know her almost like a person now because Susan talked through Katie often and sometimes when I would get on a call with Katie or with Susan like a video call, the first person to speak would be Katie. So you hop on the Zoom call and then, instead of just seeing Susan's face, you see Katie's face, right, with this big old smile and big old, wide, open mouth, puppet mouth and then Katie would begin to speak and Katie had her own personality and she was absolutely hilarious and I think Susan could be funny, but she was also channeling so much of her sweet personality through Katie and Katie was this glorious, shining soul that I got to know as Susan and through Susan, and separate from Susan, and it's hard to explain this without being in the presence of Susan and Katie. But if you've ever seen a ventriloquist, you know how the so-called puppet can take on such a life of their own.

Shannon W.:

And as Susan has passed, I have found myself mourning not only Susan but also Katie, because what Susan's creation, susan's living creation of Katie has passed with her. Now she hasn't totally passed right, because, of course, susan and Katie are both going to live on through the relationships that they touched while they were alive. But it's still a loss. I'm not just going to say like, because they touched lives and there's a legacy, a real legacy there, I'm not going to say that's not a loss, because it is a loss and it's a real loss for Susan. I think I can speak for her, because she was very clear about this. She had more life, she wanted to live, she had plans, she had dreams, she had family, she wanted to continue to see, grow and achieve and become who they were going to become. She had people she wanted to support, yeah, and she had those creative pursuits that she wanted to pursue for herself.

Shannon W.:

So I'm just, I am mourning that and you know, one thing I would say here is that our, our culture, we're not very good at grief, we're not very good at loss, we're not very good at mourning, um. This is just a little plug I want to put in for um, making space for grief in our lives, and that that could be a whole other topic or a whole other episode. But I've noticed in my own life that there's a lot of grieving that just didn't get done, not because I wouldn't want to grieve a loss, but because I just didn't know how, and also because our culture just in so many ways doesn't support it. So I just want to put a pin in that that in a time of a loss, it is not only okay to grieve, it's really essential to grieve. And looking up into grieving resources and grieving new supports for grieving that are coming into our culture, and recognizing the, the gap in grief support and um and trying to fill that so that current and future generations don't have to go, don't have to feel alone in in grief, um is a very healthy thing to me, a very healthy development thing to me, a very healthy development.

Shannon W.:

Okay, I think I'm getting close to wrapping this up, but I do want to share one more thing about Susan, and it includes a poem. One thing I love about Susan is that she loved poetry and often when we would meet she would share a poem and she always picked the most beautiful poems. So I was going back and I was looking at some of the poems that she shared over time and I found this one that she shared last July and I want to share it here in memory of her and in gratitude for all the heart and soul that she poured out. This poem is by Mary Oliver. It's called the Messenger.

Shannon W.:

My work is loving the world. Here are the sunflowers, there are the hummingbird, equal seekers of sweetness. Here are the quickening yeast, there are the blue plums, here the clam, deep in the speckled sand. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young and still not half perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished the phoebe, the delphinium, the sheep in the pasture, and the pasture which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here. Which is gratitude to be given a mind and a heart and these body clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren to the sleepy dug up clam, telling them all over and over how it is that we live forever. Thanks again, susan, rest in peace.

Shannon W.:

So I think this is about what I want to say here. If it's not really clear, I think it is. I want to just say don't wait till you retire. Damn it. Live your life now. Live your life now. Go find a way to do the thing you love. Do the things that bring you joy. Connect with the people that you love. Know that what you do and who you are matters. Know that the decisions you make and the ripples you send with your choices and your life, they matter. Tell everyone that you love them, while you can Tell everyone what you want to tell them. Don't let life go by without saying what you need to say. Like Ferris Bueller, of course. Ferris Bueller just came into my mind. You know life goes by pretty fast and if you don't stop and look around sometimes you could miss it. Let's all stop and look around and if you haven't seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off, go see that it's too good to miss. Anyone who's alive in this lifetime should give themselves the gift of seeing Ferris Bueller's day off. So I'm so thrilled to be sharing this today. Oh, one last thing I want to say is I am extra thrilled to be sharing this today.

Shannon W.:

I kind of mentioned this at the beginning of the podcast, but because the podcast has at times felt laborious, like too much work, there have been so many times that something has come to my mind and I think, oh my gosh, I want to talk about this on the podcast and I don't do it and I say, oh, I don't have time right now because the podcast is a big deal and I'm going to have to get out my microphone and I'm going to have to set up the system and you know, it feels like not exactly a burden, but it feels like something not easy. And so then I've got like probably 20 episodes I would have just sat down and talked about like this, and I didn't do it because it felt too big. And today I was like, no, you know what Post Ecuador trip, right, there's some things that really shifted for me and I'm like I'm not going to be like I was anymore. I'm really going to take life by the horns and I'm really going to do things, some of the things, differently now. And so I saw this opportunity and I went.

Shannon W.:

No, my dear friend Susan is gone. I have thoughts that I want to share about her and her passing, and I am not going to let my preexisting habits of thinking and relating to this podcast get in the way of me talking about her. And I literally came over. I'm actually proud of myself when I want to share this. I came over and I grabbed my little iPhone headphones right, this is not a podcast microphone or anything like that I plugged it into my laptop, turned it on and started recording, and I don't know how this is going to sound compared to my other episodes, but you know what? I don't really care. As long as you can understand what I'm saying, I'm good with it, because what's more important is that, a I honored my dear, lovely, precious friend Susan in the moment that my heart called me to do it. And B I didn't let myself stop me do it. And B I didn't let myself stop me. There's no reason I can't put out a podcast episode every week, because there's way more stuff on my heart than a once a week episode. I will not be short of content, I guarantee you. The only thing that's holding me back is me.

Shannon W.:

I remember a couple of years ago I was telling my partner about the fact that I was feeling trapped and bogged down. Trapped like caged in my life, like I didn't feel I had freedom to move and I was just feeling really stuck, like overwhelmed by I want to say like the merry, go round right. And he said you know, you're not trapped, actually, it's like you're standing. He could see me. He's like, it's like you're standing there in a cage and you've got your hands around the bars of the cage and you're shaking the cage and you're like let me out, let me out. But he said, if you just turn around, you're going to see that there's nothing behind you and you can just walk away free. When he said that to me, it really hit me. I knew he was right and I still couldn't turn around because the pull of that cage is so strong. So I'm thanking him in retrospect for calling that out and I feel like I'm just now getting there.

Shannon W.:

So, in honor of Susan, I'm not falling into that habit. In honor of Susan, I'm grabbing these headphones. In honor of Susan, I'm saying what I want to say in the moment and it doesn't have to be perfect. And in honor of Susan, I'm going to show up next week with a whole new episode. It's not going to be three months, it's not going to be two months, it's not going to be perfect, it might not be consistent, but it's going to be me fully living my life and showing up and not saving it for later. So thank you for listening to this and please know that I wish the very same for you. Go live your life fully. Life needs you to live it fully.

Shannon W.:

Oh, and one more quote. This comes from oh gosh, what's his name? Howard Thurman. Howard Thurman says don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who've come alive. I've loved that quote for so long and I just want for all of us to come alive. Don't wait until it's too late. Do what makes you come alive and trust that the world is going to be a better place. Because you do, and not only will you receive the gift of that joy, but all the hearts you touch will be your legacy, and you might touch someone like me who's eternally grateful for your presence, and you might. You will make a difference. Much love to you Until next week. Bye for now.

Shannon W.:

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast. If you liked this episode, please subscribe, give me a review. I have hardly any reviews. I'd love to get a review. Please pop onto Apple and give me a review and if you do, I'll find some kind of wonderful thing to give you. I'll find some cool thing to give you. Please give me a review. It'd be really fun to read something. And if you like this episode and know someone else you think would like it, please forward it to them. I would love for someone new to be able to listen to the podcast. This podcast is a labor of love for me and I am thrilled if it can be a benefit to someone else. So please take care. Thank you for listening and thank you for waking up with me. See you on the next episode.