Quilts, Grinning Turtles, and Moore (#29)

Matt Fleck:
Welcome to Encouraging Words for School Counselors – your short story podcast from school counselors about school counseling. I’m Matt Fleck with Inspire Success. Thank you for being with us.  

I hope you had a good National School Counseling Week and that the partying and celebrating didn’t wear you out too much.  

Here in this little closet where I record the podcast each week I have a big old patchwork quilt from my grandmother hanging on the door. It’s there to help absorb the sound – so that this closet, well, doesn’t sound like a closet. But I’m thinking I may have to pull it down and wrap it around me this week as our temperatures dip to the single digits. I hope it’s warmer where you are.

I don’t know what keeps you warm – physically or emotionally – during the school year, but for me, I hold on to those occasional stories of inspiration you see at the end of the news or hear on the radio. For example, I got the biggest kick out of a story in the New York Times this summer about efforts to save the Burmese Roofed Turtle – who are known as the grinning turtles – because, well you just have to Google it and see the images of those turtles smiling. It’s priceless. It’s worth printing and putting up in your office somewhere just to make you smile. 

One of the stories that has been especially inspirational for me and for many others in the midst of this pandemic, is about Captain Sir Tom Moore of Bedfordshire, England – about 50 miles northwest of London. Tom Moore who was a WWII veteran, died last week at 100 years old, just three months shy of his 101st birthday. 

You’ve probably heard or seen the story of Tom Moore. He decided last spring to walk the length of his English garden 100 times – back and forth using his walker, about a mile and a half in total – just to raise money for England’s National Health Service to support their efforts in fighting the coronavirus. He planned to do it all before his 100th birthday in April in the hopes of raising a thousand British pounds – or about 1,300 US dollars. 

He told the BBC, “Some would say I get around with difficulty but there are some who are a lot worse than me. So I can get about, but slowly. So long as people don’t want me to run about too fast, I can manage.”

By his birthday in April, his efforts had received so much attention that instead of raising $1,300, the total was equivalent to $17 million. And when Tom Moore died last week, the total had reached an amazing $45 million. Before he died, Moore told the BBC  “The thing is to remember that tomorrow is a good day. Tomorrow you will maybe find everything will be much better than today, even if today is alright. And my today is alright, and my tomorrow will certainly be alright.” 

Some days it helps to wrap yourself in those inspirational stories from others or look at pictures of smiling turtles or wrap yourself in a patchwork blanket like the one beside me with the 3 inch squares cut from old pairs of pants my grandfather wore. Sometimes it helps to have multiple layers to keep us warm and get us by. 

You can find a link to one of the many stories about Tom Moore on our Encouraging Words for School Counselors website at inspiresuccess.org/podcast. Where we invite you to not only listen to past episodes of the podcast, but to click on the Soundbooth link there and tell us a story of your own. 

Don’t forget to tell your friends that they – like you – can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Itunes, Spotfy, Stitcher, and all the other podcast apps. That way you don’t miss any of these stories and your inspiration gas tank doesn’t go empty.

Thanks for listening. I’ll leave you with more words from Tom Moore who said, “One day the clouds will have rolled by and we’ll all be a very happy people again. It will happen.”  And on that note, have a great week!