Thanks to Miss Maud and Five Senses, we’re inviting 20 listeners each day to join me and my morning programme guests for morning tea each day from Monday the 28th to Friday the 1st of August.

The morning teas will run from 10:00 a.m. to around 11:30 a.m. and should be a lot of fun. It’d be great to catch up and it’s a wonderful opportunity for me to show off my workplace for the final time before the radio station moves to Como.

We’ve done a similar thing over the last couple of years and had such a wonderful time. The food from Miss Maud is always outstanding and the Five Senses coffee is spectacular. On top of that it’s a lot of fun meeting a variety of listeners and letting people see how radio works.

If you’d like to be part of the fun simply click here to email me at my work email address and tell me which day you can join me. If you’re one of the first 20 replies for each day you’ll enjoy a delicious, free morning tea at our Morley studios thanks to Miss Maud, Five Senses Coffee and 98.5 Sonshine FM.

This story from The Sydney Morning Herald suggests that a lot of Australians are unhappy with the way things have turned out for them. The findings come from a worldwide survey undertaken by global recruitment firm Kelly Services.

Among the key findings of the survey, 71 per cent of Australians wished they had studied further while 48 per cent wished they had studied something totally different.

Another 16 per cent said they chose the wrong career, while 25 per cent were still unsure about their career choice.

The global survey sought the views of 115,000 people in 33 countries including almost 19,000 in Australia.

It wasn’t only Aussies who were found to be regretting their choices.

Australia ranked in the middle of the 33 countries with 50 per cent happy with the way the country’s education system prepared them for working life, slightly higher than the global average of 49 per cent.

So are you happy with how things are turning out for you? Do you think you’re in the right career or that you undertook enough study to get you where you want to be? If you could do it all again, would you?

The ache of regret

Regret is an interesting thing. Our regrets are often based on an unreal idea of ‘what might have been’. We become dissatisfied with an area of life and decide that life would be so much better ‘if only’. If only I’d studied more. If only I’d taken that other job. If only I’d married sooner. If only I’d stayed single. If only I’d traveled more. If only ….. and the list goes on.

Of course we really have no way of telling if life would have been any better or worse if we’d taken a different path so it’s an unfair comparison. It’s a comparison that will never let us see our life in a positive light because our imagination tells us that other choices would have turned out so much better. It’s a comparison that will prevent us from living this moment and moving forward. Regret can be such a damaging and paralysing thing.

Regret can be a helpful thing when it informs our choices for the future and lets us move on but when it holds us to the past it can steal our joy and destroy our lives.

If I had to start all over again there would probably be a few things I’d change but when I look at how life is working out I’m pretty satisfied. That doesn’t mean that things are perfect or that nothing goes wrong in my life. There have been ups and downs but my life is full of people I love and it doesn’t get much better than that?

I guess a lot of it comes down to whether we let life’s circumstances hold us back and dictate the way we see life. If we start regretting our choices every time life throws up some kind of difficulty we’ll be disappointed most of the time.

I like what Paul said when he was writing to the Philippians.

I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.

Are there regrets you need to let go? Is it time you stopped living with ‘what might have been’ and started living with ‘what’s still to come’?

Until the start of today’s 12th stage Riccardo Ricco held both the white and the polka dot jerseys. Today it seems his two stage wins in this year’s event, stages 6 and 9, can be explained by his positive tests for the performance enhancing EPO. Ricco has now been taken into police custody.

It’s being reported that one of the climber’s urine samples collected by the French Anti-Doping Agency AFLD showed traces of a third generation EPO called CERA (Continuous Erythropoietin Receptor Activator).

Team mate Juan Jose Cobo Acebo was one place higher in the general classification than Ricco with the Saunier Duval - Scott team mates in 8th and 9th places respectively.

Leonardo Piepoli, another member of the team, crossed the line in first place on the grueling 10th stage, finishing at the top of Hautacam. Juan Jose Cobo Acebo was a close second on the day giving Saunier Duval - Scott a coveted one two finish on one of the most prestigious stages of any Tour de France.

The decision to withdraw the entire team became clear after the team failed to sign in for the start of the day’s racing.

At the time of their withdrawal the team was also wearing the yellow numbers of the best team in the race.

I was cycling through an intersection this morning and got a quick whiff of something that suddenly took me back almost forty years to my grade one class in room one at Wembley Downs Primary School with Miss van Kampen. It was a smell like plasticine. I was immediately six years old again and just starting my formal education.

I remember my first year of school being a relatively happy time. If I had the opportunity to go back there …. I’d say no thanks. Life was good then but with a beautiful wife and two enormously talented kids it’s so much better now.

Isn’t it amazing how smells can bring back such strong memories? I wonder what are the smells that bring back memories for you. Are there places you go that awaken memories simply by the odours you smell there? Do some smells bring back things you’d rather forget or are they generally happy memories?

Cycling to work each morning I head past the local drive through coffee place and take in the wonderful aroma of fresh coffee. That’s always a smell associated with good things for me.

I often smell fresh baked goods as I cycle past by the local shopping centre and as I get closer to work the smell of pies and sausage rolls wafts across from the nearby bakery.

I love the fact that I can take in so much more of the world on two wheels.

I was cycling up to a set of red lights and noticed a Jeep with a sticker on the back saying “There is only one Jeep”.

Well, I’ve seen lots of Jeeps so I knew right away that this vehicle was clearly delusional. I went past it as quickly as possible.

Then as I was stopped at the lights I saw another Jeep going through the intersection and I thought, “Hurry up. You don’t want this vehicle behind me to see you. There’s no telling what it might do if you shatter its illusions. It thinks it’s the only one.”

Thankfully it got through the intersection without incident. I don’t think the first Jeep saw it and if it did it certainly didn’t recognise it.

If you’re out on the roads today, take care. There’s no telling what some vehicles might be thinking.

It’s around this time of year that I battle headwinds and rain as I cycle to work. As I’ve pushed against the wind in the past I’ve thought about the difficulties we face on the journey of life and how they can impact us.

I guess that a lot of the time we would prefer life to just roll along smoothly without hassles but we know that’s unlikely to happen. To be truthful, while I’d rather not battle headwinds all the time, I don’t really mind them that much. I know that when I’m pushing hard and seemingly getting nowhere that I’m building strength. I enjoy the challenge of getting to my destination knowing that I’ve persevered and I have a sense of achievement that I’d never have if it was all downhill with a tailwind.

Kicking Down Doors

As I think about how much good those tough rides are doing me, I start wondering about the reasoning that says that we know we’re following the right direction for our life when circumstances are easy or when things ‘fall into place’. We talk about God ‘opening doors’ and ’shutting others’. Well, sometimes I think we need to discover what God wants us to do, which isn’t always an simple thing, and then go out and kick down a few of those closed doors.

I cringe when I hear people using easy circumstances as God’s stamp of approval. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that sometimes God does give us an easy passage to accomplish his purposes but if we expect that to always be the case I think we’ll be disappointed more often than not. I do believe, and it’s been my experience, that God will sometimes open a way that previously seemed permanently shut and we need to be sensitive to that and walk through when it’s right but not just assume that if we do the right thing that life will simply fit neatly together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Of course taking the opposite view, that following the right path will always be difficult and that taking the easy way is always wrong is equally flawed.

In the end, I believe that stopping at closed doors and walking through open ones isn’t always a recipe for right living. We need to be wary of who’s hand is on those open doors.

What’s your experience?

Have you had to struggle to find the way through? Have you had to kick down a few closed doors along the way? Have you walked through an open door only to find that it’s produced more problems than it has solved? Have you also experienced those times when God has very clearly guided you through an open door?

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The tree apparently weighs almost three times as much as first thought. The bottle-shaped boab tree is being removed and transplanted 3 200 km from Warmun, in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, to Kings Park in the heart of Western Australia’s capital.

The 750 year old tree was estimated to weigh 14 tonnes. Instead, it was found to weigh a massive 37.2 tonnes. The project team has now found a bigger truck - a much bigger truck. The tree should arrive in Perth this weekend.

The tree is being moved due to roadworks in the area and it’s the first time that such a mature tree has been transported over such a distance.

Digging up the tree proved much harder than predicted too as it was embedded in granite rock, making removal extremely difficult.

They say that the boab is expected to live at least another 750 years after its journey and transplant. That’s not a bad innings for a tree. If I can get something to live for more than a couple of months in my garden I reckon I’m doing OK.