Wednesdays with Bob #7 - Be Kind - June 3 2020

Well hello, and welcome to "Wednesdays with Bob",

number seven.

Remember, this isn't a real English lesson,

but if you do need English subtitles to help you understand,

you can turn them on, they are available.

I wanted to talk today about something

a little more serious,

a little more serious in the sense that I'm going

to talk about me and then I'm going to talk about the world,

not that I have any ideas on how to fix things,

but I want to talk about me because three years ago,

right around this time, I had a blood infection.

I had a blood infection,

I think because I went to the dentist or some other reason,

and that blood infection got onto a valve in my heart

and I ended up in the hospital for about four days,

on really strong antibiotics.

But the infection damaged the heart valve

and the doctors thought it was okay,

everything looked like I would be okay,

but then a year later, so two years ago,

that valve stopped working correctly.

And as many of you know, I went to the hospital,

I ended up having heart surgery,

I had a minimally invasive procedure

where they went in from the side,

it still hurts here by the way,

and they repaired a valve on my heart,

so that was two years ago.

And then for the full year and a half or so

after the surgery, I haven't shared this with everyone,

but I didn't quite feel right,

my heart still felt a little weird.

But, as of today I'm healthy,

everything is working as well as it can be,

I'm certainly not 20 years old anymore,

and so I'm just really happy to be healthy.

So, because I had a blood infection,

I thought about life a lot because I

also needed heart surgery in my late 40s,

which is really, really young.

I thought about life a lot,

and mostly what I thought about is how important it is

to be kind to people and how unimportant things are,

and how important it is to just smile

and try to help someone in their day.

And I'm not perfect, I have days where I'm annoyed

and I have days where I'm frustrated,

and I would never claim that I am perfect person,

but the advice I would give after having been

through two health problems that really made me

think about life, and worry about life,

because I'm married and I have five kids,

and in my late 40s I didn't want to have heart problems.

So, here's what I think.

I think when I look at the news

and what's happening in the world,

and protests and riots, I just think people,

I hope people can be kind to each other.

My goal with this channel is to simply teach English

to anyone in the world that wants to learn English,

that is the contribution that I can give.

I can't think of anything else that I could do

to help make the world a better place.

So, my little goal is life is to try to be kind

as much as possible, to keep making English lessons

for people so that I can do something positive in the world.

I think when I was younger,

I wasn't always the most positive person,

and maybe that comes with age,

but certainly it comes from having experienced

a few little health problems.

And so, here's my encouragement to you, be kind to people,

if you do something wrong, apologize to people,

learn how to say that you're sorry

and make sure that you mean it.

Think about your day not in terms of what you can do

for yourself or what you can get for yourself,

but think about your day in terms of

how can I just be kind and nice to other people,

what can I do for one or two people today

in my family or my friends, or a complete stranger,

what can I do to make their life just a little bit better?

So that's my message for today,

it's one minute longer than it was supposed to be,

but thanks for watching and I'll see next Wednesday.