Today I want to appreciate the people in our lives who inspire us. They can be friends or family who offer kind words or advice. They can be someone you look up to who you never interact with but who you draw strength and encouragement from the way they go about their lives. They’re the people who get you to keep going when times get tough. People who make you want to be the best version of yourself that you can be and push yourself beyond your comfort zone.

As you go about your day today remember that the best way that you can repay the inspiration that someone else provided you is to pay it forward and offer a kind word to someone else. It doesn’t cost anything to encourage someone, and the smallest things can resonate with them.

One of the things that makes sports so fascinating to play and follow is the passion that goes into them. Being a part of a team of individuals with different personalities and backgrounds that come together for a common purpose. They become something more than just a team. They make sacrifices for one another and push each other beyond what they thought their limits were. The support and stick up for one another. It’s a captivating thing to watch people participate in something that they have such strong feelings about.

Recently a site was started up by Derek Jeter to give athletes an outlet to tell their stories. It’s such an incredible thing to read. Hockey is my favorite sport, and reading the stories that the players and former players wrote was tremendous. It’s an awesome thing to find something to dedicate yourself to. Something that makes you feel great, that you put everything you have into because you love it. Sports are one of the easier ways to see passion like that. It’s played out in front of you live. You get to watch it with other fans.

But passion can be found anywhere. It’s not something that is reserved for athletes in the primes of their lives. Passions can be found in all areas of life. We live in a time where it’s never been easier to share your passions with others. We have outlets to write. There are internet communities to discuss and share the things you love with people from around the world. There are a number of sites to sell crafted things or art. Appreciate that it’s never too late to embrace what you feel passionate about and take advantage of the amazing times we live in to pursue the things the make you feel the way Marty St. Louis looks in the picture above hoisting the Stanley Cup. There’s never been a better time to do than now.

Today I want to take a moment and appreciate the simple comforts in my life. I’m incredibly lucky that I have the luxury of doing a site like this where I get the chance to take a step back once a day and think about what makes life great and share it with others. I can only do that because of the comforts that life has afforded me.

I live close by to any of the basic needs I’d want and a short commute away from where I work. The biggest worry about food I have is figuring out what I want to eat. I have access to the internet, a limitless depository of knowledge and entertainment. I have shelter and transportation. I have good friends and a great family.

All too often in life we get hung up on our needs and wants. We think about what we don’t have and what we need to do to get it. We spend so much time being unsatisfied and longing for something else, something we think is more. It’s good to reset every now and then and appreciate what you do have in life that you take for granted after a while.

To me, when you appreciate what you have, when you add to it you build up, you make the whole a better thing. If you only focus on the want or the need and forget the good things you have, when you add something it’s like tossing it into a hole, an empty foundation. The want is still there, and you keep chasing other things when what you were looking for is what you had all along.

Today being Father’s Day, I want to take a moment and appreciate my own Dad. I was blessed to be born to two tremendous parents. I had the best role model anyone could ever ask for in my father. I think more so as an adult than when I was a kid, my father is my hero. He is an incredible man and has been such a big factor in who I am today.

My dad taught me the value of working hard and doing the right thing when you have to make a choice simply because it is the right thing to. I’ve watched my dad work jobs that he hated. Jobs that he did not want to do. But each and every time he went to work he gave it his all. He would always do the best job that he could because it was the right thing do. Someone gave him an opportunity to have a paying job, and in return for being able to pay his rent, feed and buy clothes for me and my sisters, keep the lights on and everything else that goes into being a parent with responsibilities, my dad would work as hard as he could and do the best job that he was able, regardless of the job he was working at.

He’s someone who has touched the lives of the people that he worked with or who worked for him. I had the rare opportunity to work with people who once worked with my dad, and the way they spoke about him blew me away. I got to see my dad through the eyes of other people and see how much he meant to them. There are people walking around who are better just from having known my dad, and that was a really cool thing for me to get to see.

I’ve gotten to see my dad in his element, doing something he loves. I have had the opportunity to do Civil War living histories with him and camp out on battlefields. For all the times that I saw him stoically working away at a job that he was not in to, I have also seem him do something that he loves doing and is passionate about. I have seen him surrounded by his friends and completely at ease, enjoying life.

He’s is an interesting guy. On the outside he is a dad like most, quiet and not very open about his feelings. It took me a while to understand him better. Things would come through like how he would interact with our animals that I would see his true feelings. He was always better at expressing affection with furry friends than with other humans. But I came to understand that the way he was with our pets is the way he felt about me and my sisters, he just didn’t know how to show it.

I grew up watching my dad sacrifice things over and over and over again for the good of his family. As a little kid I watched my dad go on the road and have to be away from his family for extended periods to be able to pay the bills. Later, I saw my dad work nights and come home and stay awake long enough to see me and my sisters off to school. When I played sports he would always come to my games to see me play.

Knowing him better later in life, I can only imagine the stress he went through trying to hold it together at time. It wasn’t easy. But my dad taught me the importance of keeping outwardly calm and not letting the world and the people that are looking up to you know how bad it is. I learned about being dependable, someone that people can count on, no matter what you have going on personally. He sacrificed so much for so long for the good of others. That’s the most important thing of all I learned from him, what love really is. That you do all of that for the people you love without begrudging the world a thing. I love my dad and am incredibly proud of him, and I hope that I will be half the man he is when I have a family one day.

This weekend I want to appreciate those moments in your life where everything feels like it is working in perfect harmony. In sports they call it being in the zone. You can see it when a musician really truly feels their performance and watching them looks like the notes they are playing are being ripped right from their soul. It’s tremendous to watch.

Unfortunately, I have no musical or artistic talent. I’ll never know what it’s like to draw a masterpiece or play in a band where everything just clicks and the end result is this amazing, moving thing. For me, physical exertion always felt more natural. The closest thing I have is those rare moments when I push myself to run as hard and as fast as I can for as long as I can until I just can’t go any more.

I’ve written about it before, but by no means am I runner. I’m not the fastest and I definitely can’t run the longest. But, in that moment, where I am pushing myself as hard as I can go, I am tapping in to something beautiful. Every muscle in my body is working, striving, pushing harder and harder. Every breath and every heartbeat is fueling my body to go forward. There is no room for thought, it’s one of the only times where the only thing there is room for is pure, unadulterated action. Everything fades away and all you can hear is the rush of wind in your ears as you go faster and faster.

I love those moments. I live for them. Where you feel like the maestro in the most perfect life symphony ever played. If you haven’t found your moment yet, there’s no better day than today to start looking. Appreciate that there is something out there for you just waiting to be discovered. If you’ve found your harmony, your place of solace, cherish it and always appreciate it.

As you may have guessed from the name of this blog, I am a big fan of coffee. The site’s name comes from the title of the email I would send out each day to my co-workers that were in a coffee club with me. Each day I’d let them know when the coffee was ready and include random pictures or quotes or things I found interesting. Those emails were the inspiration for this site, so it seemed appropriate to keep the name.

Coffee is tremendous. I love the way it smells. I love mixing and matching different flavors and coming up with new combinations to try. I don’t even drink it to wake up, I just enjoy the taste. Coffee also has numerous health benefits. Coffee has been shown to increase metabolic rate in the short term, contains nutrients like vitamin B2, B5 and Potassium, can lower your risk of type II diabetes, help lower your risk for Alzheimer’s and Dementia, lower your risk of developing cirrhosis of the liver, and contains a ton of antioxidants. Black coffee also has about 2 calories per cup.

It’s an all-around fantastic drink. This Sunday, I will follow my own advice and take a moment to stop and smell the coffee and appreciate the wonderful drink that has brought me so much happiness.

Music is a pretty incredible thing. It adds spice to life. It heightens the moments that it gets added to. It can build the tension in a suspense movie, bring tears to your eyes when you see something sad, or get your adrenaline pumping. There’s a song for anything you want to feel. For every triumphant moment or dark time, there’s a song written that relates to what you are going through.

Music also has this mystical quality to take you someplace else in your mind with only a few notes. Hearing a particular song can take you back to your high school dance or playing in your living room as a child in an instant. All the memories and emotions associated with that moment come rushing back to you. It can remind us who we were, or make us feel like who we want to be.

I recently had some people in my life share some of their favorite music with me, music that I would have never heard otherwise, and it reminded me of other good times. And I now have a song about eggplants to remind me of this period of my life too. Take time to appreciate the flavor that music has added to your life today, and maybe take a moment and share some of your favorite songs with someone you think might like it. You never know, it just might make their day.

Memorial Day began as Decoration Day after the Civil War. In 1868, the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union Army veterans, established it as a time for honoring those who died in war by going to their graves and decorating them with flowers. Memorial Day isn’t just a day for honoring veterans of war. Living veterans of wars had the fortune to be able to go home. Memorial Day is for taking a moment to appreciate all those who were not so fortunate.

There is no arguing that war is an abominable thing. Within the horror of war though, there remains the fact that the people who did the fighting were people, they were human beings. Wars are filled with stories of humanity coming to the fore and people treating one another with mercy and compassion, people making sacrifices to save the others that they serve with. Wars accelerate the pace of those moments in life on which the destinies of entire generations of people are hinged. How many family trees are still growing today because someone’s grandfather did something extraordinary to save someone else? And how many people were never born because of the sacrifice a soldier made?

Regardless of your feelings on war, we can all take a moment to appreciate the humanity of the people involved and honor the memory of those who died. I originally had a quote to lead this post and took it down. To me it’s not about glorifying a flag or a country or a patch of ground. After you strip everything away, it’s about the people. It’s about commemorating the sacrifices they made when all they had were one another.

It’s an incredible time to be alive. Because of technology, we have continuous access to all of the world’s knowledge on a square device that fits in our pockets that we carry around with us. If there is something I don’t know, I don’t need to go to a library or page through a set of encyclopedias. All I need to do is pull out my phone and swipe around a little and I can find the answer. I don’t have to worry about being lost. I can bring up a map any time I need that will tell me exactly where in the world I am and even speak to me to tell me where I need to go to get to my destination.

It’s mind-blowing when you stop to think about it. Forget Merlin or Gandalf, this is real-deal sorcery. We interact with devices that turn us into the most amazing wizards that anyone could ever conceive of. I can magically make TV shows and movies fly from my phone to my tv with a waggle of my finger. I can play any song, ever, at will. All from thin air. I can bring up any great work of art in a matter of seconds.

It’s genuinely awesome to think about. I am able to see things on a tiny screen that fits in the palm of my hand that it would normally take a trip around the world to see. I will never have enough time in my lifetime to see all the things that I will want to in person, but through the magic of Google StreetView I can sit in my living room and “drive” down the street of any city in any country around the world. It’s amazing to think about how much the world has changed over the years, and it’s exciting to think of where we could be in another 10 or 20 years. As you go through your day today, take a moment and think about how we live in a world where there we are surrounded by miracles that have become a part of everyday life and appreciate how lucky it is to be alive in this day and age.

I would like to take a moment this Sunday, appropriately Mother’s Day, to appreciate my Mom. I may be biased, but I think that my mother is a tremendous person. She taught me things about life and myself just by going about her own life. So much of who I am today is because I had her to look up to as I was growing up.

My mom went back to college later in life to get a degree in education and pursue a career as a teacher. I can’t even imagine how difficult that journey must have been for her. She would often be one of the older people in her classes. She had been out of school for a long time and didn’t have the benefit of things like math being fresh in her memory to help ease the transition. She had to balance out the expectations of being a mom to me and my sisters and a wife to her husband all while studying and writing papers. To this day I marvel at her strength not only for what she did but also what she continues to do.

I’m sure there were times where she wondered if she could do it, if it was worth it, if she was being selfish for doing this, what it all would amount to. But I believe she recognized something within herself, a spark of purpose, something where she knew that she could make a difference in people’s lives by giving a piece of herself through teaching. She owed it to herself to see how brightly that spark could burn. In the end, it was worth it and she is one of the teachers that I believe makes an impact on her students.

Because of my mom, I know that it is no such thing as it being too late in life or too old to reinvent yourself and pursue your passions, so I don’t need to worry about getting it “right” in life. I know to always be myself, because that’s the best version of me I can be, and to not let other think of me keep me from being myself. I know there is never any reason to give up and that we are so much stronger than we know. I know that for as many times as you get turned down and that the odds are stacked against you, to keep going, because it only takes one opportunity to show what you can do. I know to seize the opportunities that life gives me with everything I have and to put a piece of myself in the things that I do. My mom is awesome, and I’m proud to be her son.