My song today is ‘Perfect Day’. This song is sung every year between Norah Bower and her daughter, Helen Avison on mum’s birthday. It is their special song that symbolises the close friendship that any mother can have with her loving daughter and closest friend. We wish Norah (who lives in Wilsden, West Yorkshire) a happy 82nd birthday today. Born in Liverpool, Norah grew up in Donegal, Ireland, and recalls the happiest of childhoods. It gives me the greatest pleasure to invite all of you to sing along with Helen and her mother today, and help to make this old lady’s day, a ‘Perfect Day’.
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I ask all of you today to positively focus on the year ahead and to remain eternally grateful for all of the good days in our lives. Our own experiences can better help all our tomorrows, so long as we journey forward with gratitude, understanding, acceptance, hope, love, forbearance, and forgiveness.
What makes a ‘perfect day’ for one person is as different as there are belief systems. Some of us might consider being left alone in peace to be a perfect day whereas that state of isolation might drive another person around the bend just to have their own company. There is no perfect condition to be ever called the perfect time of one’s day that is not in the moment. Every day can feel to be a good day for anyone to take some action as long as that action remains good and for the benefit of others. When my mother would tell me, “It costs nothing to be kind, Billy”, I now know that she was telling me that every day is the perfect day to be kind to one another.
I often miss the presence of my mother’s smile, her sheer exuberance, and love of life, and her unshakable faith in humanity always to look at the brighter side of life and the better side of any person’s personality. I used to think as a child that if God could have been everywhere at one time, there would have been no need to make mothers to watch our backs. Had I been able to delve into my mother’s heart, I have no doubt that at the bottom of it, I would have found forgiveness and understanding in abundance.
We never know the biggest day of your life is your biggest day, not until it’s happening. We often cannot recognize the most perfect day of our life, not until we’re right in the middle of it. The day we commit to something or someone. The day we get our heart captured or broken. The day we meet and marry your soul mate. The day we realize there’s not enough time in our lives because life is good and because we want to live forever. Those are the biggest days, the best days, and the perfect days of our lives.
You cannot live a perfect day without doing something good for someone who never expected it or who will never be able to repay you. My own perfect day changes with the moment of any new experience. My own perfect day is going to bed with a dream and waking up with a purpose. My own perfect day is any day for letting go of anything which serves me no useful purpose.
So, let each of us consider today to be a perfect day to sing along with all our birthday celebrants, to help make their day perfect in every sense of the word.
Love and peace Bill xxx