This week I travelled to Montreal where I had a chance to catch up and say goodbye to my work friends. It gave me the opportunity to pause and reflect about the different types of friends and connections that cross our paths throughout our lives.

Welcome to the 67^th edition of The Sunday Spark, a series with weekly thoughts and highlights, nuggets of learning, and a decluttering challenge for the week. In addition to friends and connections, this week’s edition looks at the state of biodiversity in Canada, sustainable and affordable power, and laundry room decluttering.  

On my mind this week: Friends and connections

It’s June and that means I’m retiring this month! Wow! Those six months since I told my boss of my plans to retire have just flown by.

This week I travelled to Montreal for a team meeting. While I was there, I had a chance to catch up and say goodbye to my Quebec work friends. It gave me the opportunity to pause and reflect about the different types of friends and connections that cross our paths throughout our lives.

One of the downsides of retirement is we lose the natural social connection that we often take for granted while working. I’ve been fortunate to work with some wonderful people over the years, and I’ll definitely miss them when I stop working. I’m sure I’ll stay in touch with many of them, while others will fade away into memory.

Diversification of friends and connections

Working in the investment business, we talk a lot about diversification. After saying goodbye to my Montreal work friends, I considered the various groups of friends who have touched my life. Here’s a roundup of the main groups in my diversified friend portfolio:

• It’s only fitting to start with work friends. We go through a lot with the people we work with. I’ve supported work friends through births, deaths, adoptions and illnesses. We’ve helped each other adjust to hirings, firings, promotions, difficult projects and even more difficult bosses.
• Related to my work friends are my ISCEBS friends. ISCEBS is the professional association that I had the honour of leading as the 2023 President. In addition to professional development, I’ve built up a network of friends locally and across Canada and the U.S. through my involvement. In fact, I’m meeting up with some of those local ISCEBS friends this week for dinner.  
• Then there’s my Queen friends, or “my Queenies” as I affectionately call them. I’ve met most of them at Breakthru, the North American Queen convention and we stay in touch primarily by social media. Although we’ve spent little time together in person, our shared passion for our favourite band fuels our friendship.
• Of course, there are church friends. My church community has been an amazing source of emotional, spiritual and practical support over the years. I can’t imagine my life without this group.
• And let’s not forget the blogging friends! While we’ve never met in person, we’ve built real connections through reading and commenting on each other’s blog posts.
• Finally, we have lifelong friends—people we’ve know for most of our lives. Even if we live far apart, when we get together the years melt away.

Ultimately, we all need social connection and there’s a growing body of evidence about the impact of loneliness and social isolation on our physical and mental health. As I head into retirement, I think I have a well diversified portfolio of friends and connections to fill the void left by the reduced role of work friends in my life.

Thank you for being a friend!

There’s a saying that people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. I suspect I may have people from every one of the above groups reading this post. If you’re reading this, I’m glad you’re in my life! Thank you for making my friends and connections portfolio richer!

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Three highlights of the week

It’s important to celebrate big milestones and simple pleasures in life. Keeping the trend going, here are three highlights and simple pleasures of the week gone by:

• My week got off to a good start on Monday when my Air Canada flight to Montreal left and arrived a few minutes early. But they took it back on Wednesday when our flight home was delayed by almost an hour.
• I enjoyed a wonderful dinner with three of my work friends in Montreal on Monday evening. We shared tapas, sangria and lots of laughs. 
• The timing of my trip coincided with our sales and client relations teams being in Montreal for their conference. This gave me the opportunity to see and say goodbye to many people that I’ve worked with over my 35 years in the business. I attended their happy hour (or 5 à 7 as the French Canadians call it) and enjoyed some great conversations over a couple of Aperol Spritzes.

Things I learned this week

Thanks to my travels, I’m a little behind on my blog and newsletter reading. Here are a couple of things I learned this week.

The state of biodiversity in Canada

Biodiversity is critical to the health of our planet, and our own individual health. I was shocked to learn this week that one in five species in Canada is at some level of risk. It’s a clear sign that we need to do better.

(Source: WildSpecies.ca)

Sustainable and affordable power

Critics often claim that carbon-friendly alternatives will drive up the cost of living. Portugal is proving otherwise. This European country gets 91% of its electricity supply comes from renewable energy. And, they have the lowest electricity prices in Europe. Take that, climate critics!

(Source: The Progress Playbook)

This week’s decluttering challenge – the laundry room

In 2024, I’ve been revisiting the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge I completed in 2021. This week’s challenge was the laundry room, and I’m happy to report I got back on track by decluttering 21 items. You can find the details, along with my tips and learnings, in this week’s decluttering post.

If you’d like to join the challenge, visit this post to download your free checklists and jump right in with this week’s task.

I’d love to hear what you think about any of this week’s topics. Drop me a comment below and let me know your thoughts and ideas.