Karen Kenney: Hey you guys, welcome to the Karen Kenney show. I'm super duper excited to be here with you today, and I just want to tell you a quick little story, a quick
little something that's been on my mind, and I have no idea what I'm going to call this sucker. There's so many different names I could call it directions. I could take it,
but one of the things that I do want to do is maybe a little bit of myth busting or idea busting or whatever, and I'll tell you what I'm talking about in a minute. But
first, let me just say thank you so much for spending time with me, for making a choice consciously, to tune in and to listen. I super duper appreciate you and getting this
opportunity to connect with you through the airwaves, you know. So, okay, here's, here's the gist of it. Here's the gist of it. I could call this episode something like life,
well lived. Life well lived, or something about like, you know, like, why playing small isn't like, you know, people tell you, stop playing small. Like, everybody's like,
stop playing small. Don't play small. We're going to get it. We're, I'm going to make have this all make sense in a minute. But we often hear things like, about, like, don't
play small. Like, go big or go home. It's all about like, going big and going big. And I have met a bunch of people over the years who have said things to me like, but what if
I don't want to go big, right? Like, some people are destined, right? Some people like come through. They want to be superstars. They want to be on the cover of this. They
want to be on stage. They want to be famous. They want to be well known. They want to scale their business. They want to have big cars and big houses and big money and big
all this stuff. And then there are some people who really just don't give a shit about all of that stuff. And it was funny, because I was just looking at this design,
like website. I don't know if it was Architectural Digest or whatever it was, but it was this concept about small spaces, and I'm going to connect all this to a life well
lived. Just stay with me. I promise I'm going to connect the dots, and it's going to make a difference, I think, as especially as we're heading into this new year. So just
stay with me, please. I was just reading something, and there was an article, and it basically said, this was the tagline on the article of this this thing, it was about
small spaces, and how to decorate small spaces, right? And this is what it said. It says a small space doesn't have to mean small ideas. And I thought, Oh, I really
love that. So just because you have a small room, a small bedroom, bathroom, pantry, hallway, whatever it is, it doesn't mean, mean that you have to think small, like, you
can, like, think a little bit wider or bigger, or just, you know, don't have to have small, small ideas. And then I thought, well, if I just replaced two of these words,
and instead of saying a small space doesn't have to mean small ideas, I thought to myself, and I'm going to explain why in a minute, a small life doesn't have to mean
small impact. A small life doesn't have to mean small impact. Now, let me tell you what I mean by a small life, right? Okay, so recently, I found out that a childhood
friend, their brother passed away. He was also a childhood friend. He was though, like five or six years older than than me, and his name was Bobby, and his sister Michelle
was my sister Kim, her best friend, one of her best friends growing up. And Michelle spent a lot of time at our house when we were kids, and we spent time over at her
house. And we were laughing, because she was basically saying, I just remember being at your house all the time. And I said, Well, you were at our house a lot. In fact, she
lived with us for one whole summer, basically threw her shit in, like a garbage bag and, like, came down the street and just lived with us for like, a summer. That's the
kind of house we were, that's the kind of mother I had. And, you know, people liked being at that particular house that we lived at, because in this particular rental where
we rented, we live right across the street from a pack, you know, a pack with, like, the best swings and like the seesaws and the merry go round in the big ass slide, the
metal slides that would burn the shit out of you.
In the summertime. You know, you would get scorched, because that thing would get like, hotter than the sun. That thing would be like, hotter than Hades. Oh my god. Plus in
our rental, we had an in ground pool. We lived across the pack, and we had wicked cool we had a cool mother, like my mother. My mother like when I tell you what, I tell
you that my mother's gravitational pull. I say this about myself, but it's just true. My mother's gravitational pull was really strong, and she was. Beautiful. She was
young, she was hip, she was smart, she was funny, and she saw people, and when you were in her presence and her light shone on you like you felt it okay, that's important.
Okay. So Michelle's brother Bobby passed away. Now we did spend time at their house as well, and we were like, the annoying little sisters that were, like, hanging
around, you know? And he'd be like, yeah, yeah. Like, he put up with you. And then he'd be like, beat it, you know, because there's a really big difference between when
you're like, eight versus when you're like, let's say 14 or whatever. You're just way too cool for school. And so Bobby loved music. He was cool, you know, like, all this
stuff. He was cute, but he would, he'd like had enough of his own little sister, nevermind the other two that, like, were hanging around all the time. So I knew
Bobby, but I hadn't seen him in like, probably, like, 40 years. But I did stay in touch with his sister. We were still friends on Facebook, and I saw what she was up to,
and her kids and, like, all this stuff. So when I got the news, my sister, you know, and I we texted each other, and she asked me if I was going to the wake. So we made plans
to go down to the wake. Now, we went to the Wake last week, and I'm going to tie this all together like I said, stay with me. We're coming back to this idea of how a
small life doesn't have to mean small impact, right? A small life can be a life well lived. And again, I'll explain what I mean by small in a minute. So when we get
down to the when I get down to the funeral hall home for the week, it was kind of a trip, because we used to live my sister and I, because we rented all over the place,
right? We were like the poor kids. We just hopped to wherever the rent was, wherever we were able to get rent or pay rent or whatever, or my mother or whatever, could
pay rent. So we lived right next door, I mean literally right next door, to this funeral home. So it was kind of a trip to be back in that neighborhood. And so I pulled
up a pack out front. I see that there's a line out the door. It sat in to sprinkle a little bit. Thank God it didn't start to rain or snow, whatever, but it was cold out,
but people were waiting in line, and my sister wasn't quite there yet. So I start to talk to the woman who was behind me as we're waiting for the door to the building to,
like open, because the line is so long that it's now spilling out outside onto the sidewalk, down the street a little bit. So I sat talking to the woman behind me, and she
says that her son, right Bobby, who passed away, he was her son's coach, and her son was either at work or away at school. I didn't quite catch the whole thing, and she
said, but he was really upset that he couldn't be here at the wake. So she decided to just come in his in his stead, like she's, like, I'll go and represent like,
I'll go and represent you. And that right there told me something about Bobby. Now, again, this is somebody I hadn't seen in like, 40 years, or whatever. My sister shows
up. It takes about 20 minutes. We're outside for at least 20 minutes, and then we finally get inside, like the door opens, and I see that the line ahead of us has got to be
like, easily, 50 people deep. I mean, this is a long line, and when I tell you that the calling hours were from four to eight, but the line started. They told me at 330,
people were already lining up outside. And when I tell you that I didn't leave until a little before eight, and the line was still all the way from the front door up to the
casket, and it was just one of the most remarkable and impactful things. And I just kept standing there and thinking about this. Is a guy who never left his hometown, as far
as I knew. Like now he might have gone away to college or whatever, but like he lived in his hometown his whole life. He coached, like, if you could see all the pictures, you
know how, like at funerals and stuff, they put up, like the poster board, and they put pictures across a person's whole lifetime on them. There were so many of those, and so
many of them were COVID and like, baseball teams and football teams and whatever. So he has a guy, he has three kids of his own, Married for like, 37 years. Like, wicked,
long time. Never left his hometown. I think he was a Christian, like, was involved in his, like, local church and all this stuff. And he also did stuff for, I don't know,
like, all I know it's like, involves elderly people and, like, where they lived, and he would like, go and he would plow, and he would volunteer, and he was on this board,
and he did all these things. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, I kept thinking about this idea of how people will try to tell you, like, stop playing small,
like you. You gotta play big. You gotta go big or go home, you know. And there are people who are like, but I don't want all of that. I don't want the big cars and the big
money and the big house and the big popularity and the fame and the fortune. And I think we get sold some bullshit idea that to live a simple life. Isn't good enough
that, in this capitalistic society, if you don't want to scale things or get more or do more or go big or Garner No no, like, What are you even doing with your life? Like, if
you're not wicked ambitious, right? If you don't want to be on the stage and be seen and have a platform and be on all these social media things like, What are you even
doing with your life? Right? And it's just a bunch of bullshit. It's so much bullshittery That it's like painful. And this idea just got driven so deeply home as I was standing
in this funeral palette, watching this line and the people and the stories, because I'm a chronic eavesdropper. As a writer, I'm a chronic eavesdropper. And the stories that
people were telling and the laughter that even his family up at the front of the line, you know, they're like crying, but they're hearing all these stories about their dad
and their husband, and it was just one of the most remarkable displays. And I thought to myself, this is a guy who didn't have a fancy job, he didn't leave his hometown, he
didn't like, go big. I'm not saying like, and this is the point I want to make about like. What does it mean to have a small life? I mean a small life like, you stay in
your hometown, you take care of your people, you go to the same church, you see the same people in your community. You actually are in a community that you participate in. Help
build foster like there were kids there on those poster boards who were like, started playing with him when they were like five, six years old, and now they're out of
college, going to their first jobs, and I'm thinking, holy shit. Like, What a legacy and the amount of love in that room. This person, Bobby, was beloved. He was beloved.
And you could just feel it in the room. You could see it in people's faces. You could hear it in their words, just the energy in the vibe. A small life doesn't have to mean
small impact. You can have incredible impact and not do all the big, fancy things, you know. And it makes me think about like, let's just for example, take like the people
who are on stage, like the ones who do want to be out front, the ones who do want to, you know, go big, whatever. All of those people are often able to do what they do,
because there's a bunch of other people who are happy behind the scenes, who don't want to be in front of the camera, who don't want the glory, who don't need their name to be
known, who don't need their ego stroked in as big of a way, right? There are the people who are like, happy to be in the wings, supporting and their value and their life is
no less important, because somebody else might be like, well, they just played small and they stayed small. Now look, there might be times when we're keeping ourselves small
for 1000 different reasons, and that's this episode is not that, right? But there might be times when we're playing small out of fear. And I'm not talking about that. If
you're somebody who has big dreams and you do want to go for it, right? Like you do want to go for it, there is nothing enlightened about playing small, as Marianne
Williamson says, right? You want to go big. And if you're an environment where other people get uncomfy when you shine a little too bright, they can suck it in a bucket,
let them deal with it, right? But if you're playing small out of fear that other people won't be able to handle it, let them figure it out and handle it. But if you're somebody
who's just like, I just want to be and I don't use the word just condescendingly, they're like, I just want to be a stay at home mom. I just want to, like, raise a
family. I just want to be close to my people that I grew up with. I want to blah, blah, blah, blah. I think sometimes that people look at that
with a little bit of a condescending attitude. And what I'm trying to say is you can choose to stay local, stay, quote, unquote small, and still have an incredibly
well lived life, an incredibly impactful life where you change like your life is a legacy to that town, to your family, to your friends, to all those kids that got coached
like I'm just thinking about this. I haven't stopped thinking. About it since I was since I was there, and it was so remarkable, and it made me so happy for his children that
they got to hear all of those stories. Because, you know, you don't always you when you're a kid, you can't always see your parents clearly for good and for bad, we
can't always see the places like you know, sometimes you I talked about this in an earlier episode, you put them up on a pedestal like you do this thing where you
don't have quite clear vision, but also sometimes you don't understand their brilliance and their amazingness and the way that they've changed lives. And just
listening to all the stories of how many lives Bobby changed, like, Oh my God. And when Michelle saw us like she didn't know we were there. So we waited, we waited. I'm
telling you, this was like a five hour line, you guys. It did not stop people after people after people just showing up. So at some point it was just like the three
children. His wife, up by the casket, Michelle went and, you know, our family friend, our friend, took a break so she didn't know we were there. And when she's
sitting with her two sons, and we come walking over and you guys her face, if you could have seen her face, I wish I I've recorded it in my mind, but I wish I could
beam it into your brain right now so you could have the same experience. And the way her face, her eyes, she's beautiful, beautiful girl. I mean, she's a she's a
woman, you know, she's beautiful. And her eyes just lit up, and she just grew like, held her face, and she kept saying, oh my god, oh my god. And she jumped up and and
she hugged us, and she was crying, and we were crying, and it was like this whole thing. And, you know, we got to see her sister, and we got to see her mom, and we
hadn't seen her mom again, like, in 40 years, and her auntie, like, and I'm just like, Is your mom gonna remember us? And she's like, of course. And it was like this
whole moment, and it was so deeply impactful to me to see how much impact this one person had, you know, and there's this saying that says, like, you know, I think about how a
candle, how one little candle, you put it in front of a mirror, and it can reflect a lot of light. It can also light hundreds of other candles. And that's how I think about
Bobby is he was such a powerful light in this little town in Massachusetts, just living his life and trying to do his best to be a good dad, a good husband, a good man, a
part of his community, I'm assuming, a good Christian, based on some of the things that I heard, right? He loved his people, and he loved deeply, and he was reliable. Like, I
can't speak for every single, like, second of the guy's life, but for anybody out there who's listening, who might start to feel like, well, I don't have a big platform, or
I don't have a lot of followers, or I don't have a lot of friends, or I don't get a lot of likes, or what I do doesn't matter. Please, please, please, do not believe the
bullshit that that inner critic and maybe some of your family members and what society and everybody's trying to tell you, you matter. You are good enough. You are enough.
You are lovable. What you you you are the light of the world. You too are like a candle that can light up people around you. It doesn't mean you have to go out and go
big, but just wherever you are planted right now, wherever you stand, wherever you live, you matter, and you can make a difference. And it's got, it's just really got me
thinking about some things right now. And I think, you know, some of us have really big dreams sometimes, and sometimes they're realistic. I think we should all dream. I
think we should allow ourselves to dream big if we want to dream big. I don't think we should put our dreams in small boxes. But not everybody wants the big, big, big, jumbo
size, the Jumbotron. You know, jumbo size, life, and your life, instead of being big and wide, it can be close and smaller, but incredibly deep. And I just want to leave
you with that as we're moving into this new year, as we're starting to reflect on what we really want, and I know for myself, I really want to simplify. I talk about this
every year, but I feel like sometimes there's a little too much going on for my nervous system. So. And I know myself. I know I have the capacity to be big and go
big. And there are some dreams that I have that are pretty big that I'm not going to give up on. And it doesn't mean if it doesn't happen, that I haven't lived a life
well, that I haven't had a well lived life or a life well lived, and the same is true for you. Now, this doesn't mean that we just give up and we don't go after things, and we
don't, you know, try to be creative and like, you know, do do big things, if the calling is in your heart, if your internal teaches pointing to something, if you get
lit up around, like, follow that. But what lights you up might be that you do a food drive or a clothing drive, or you volunteer at the shelter, or, like, whatever. It
doesn't have to be that you're out like, all the time, making a gazillion dollars, like, and everybody wants to be your friend because you're famous or you're special. You
know, we're all we're all special, and none of us are special. So I guess you know it's like, I want you to be thinking about what you really want, like, be really intentional
as you're moving into this new year. And I always say, like, the universe cannot get behind wishy washy. You know, it needs us to get some clarity about who we want to be,
how we want to be, what really matters to us, what we value, why we're here, why we think we're here, what we're going to do about it with the time that we have. Like,
what is that? Because I believe that we all have as a course in Miracle tells us our own individual curriculum. We all have a divine assignment, and those assignments look
different for different people. And I don't really give a shit about what everybody else is doing. What most excites me is you getting wicked clear about what you want to
be doing, who you want to be, who you want to be doing it with. And these are some of the things that I love to help people with. These are some of the things we talk about
in the nest, in my my spiritual group, mentoring program. And as you always say, you can find out all the stuff that I'm up to. Karen kenney.com you want to find out
about the nest. Karen kenney.com/nest but you guys just I hope you hear this. I hope I hear from some of you about this episode, because I think we've all been kind of sold
a bill of goods that we have to as individuals become brands, and we need to keep churning out content for free for these big these big platforms, those platforms,
people talk about having a platform? No, you don't have a platform. They're the platform, and they're just using you for free content and add add time and ad space. Let's just be
honest about what's really going on. But your life is not lived online. Your life is lived right now in the present moment, with the people who are in front of you, the
animals who are in front of you, the community that's in front of you, the neighbors who are next door, whatever it is that's where we can be impactful, who's
right in front of you right now and who needs your help. How can you contribute to your family, to your friends, to your community, to act, to creativity, to the
world, like, what's your contribution? And it doesn't have to be on a grand scale to mean that it doesn't matter. A small life doesn't have to mean small impact. And I'm
not saying that Bobby had a small life in a condescending way. I just mean, like locally, like where he lived, he stayed and he went deep, and he had roots and manned
those roots grow and flourish and seed and create a bounty and a harvest of love that affected 1000s. When I tell you how many people, and those are just the people who
could come. Those are just the people who like, I don't even know, but man, it got me to I'm like, Man, when my time comes, when my time comes,
I hope. And it's not so much about leaving a legacy for me, because I don't have human children, but like I want my legacy to be the love that I shared with people, the way
that I the way that people felt in my presence, hopefully, hopefully, at least one book, right? I want, I want, I want to leave a book behind, you know, but I hope, I hope,
with the the time I have left and the air I have left in my lungs, right the breaths that I have left that I am making an impact. And it, you know, it, it makes me emotional
to think about it, that it was beautiful. It was beautiful to see these people in line and to see how. Beloved My childhood friend was, and just to see the impact that he
made. And man, may we all leave behind that much love. I think I'm gonna end it here, wherever you go, wherever you go, may you leave yourself and the people in the place,
the animals, the environment, better than how you found it wherever you go, may you your presence, your love, your life, be a blessing. Bye, bye.