The other day, my kindergartner pranced around the house singing that “Michael Finnegan” song, and naturally, I started thinking about “beginning again.”

Do you know the song? It’s one of those catchy childhood rhymes that sticks in your head and has an unexpected morbid ending. (We’ll discuss the dark and morbid stories embedded in nursery rhymes another time.)

“There was an old man named Michael Finnegan.
He grew fat and then grew thin again.
Then he died and had to begin again.
Poor old Michael Finnegan. Begin again.”

And then you keep singing the song over and over and over and over until one of your parent’s heads’ explodes. I did that a lot to my parents when I was a kid.

These days, I focus less on the annoying repetition and more on the fact that good ol’ Michael Finnegan had to begin again every time the song ended. It’s inspiring, really. The man was reborn with each iteration despite each parental cringe. (He was also a swing dieter, apparently.)

We, too, can begin again in each and every single moment of our lives. But we don’t have to wait until the end of a song or the end of a year. We don’t have to wait until the sun comes up tomorrow. We can begin again right now. And now. And again.

Each moment is another opportunity to realign our thoughts, feelings, decisions, words, and actions with our values. And it’s another opportunity to evaluate our values to make sure they’re actually important to us.

Consider this moment right now. What thoughts are you thinking? What feelings do you have? What decisions, words, and actions are you about to deliver? Do they align with your values? And are your values really that important to you? If not, then this is the moment to “begin again.”

Be well,
Rachael