Want to be Happy? Quit Yer Bitchin'

Life is hectic, isn’t it? There’s so much to do, and only so many hours in the day, and God, there are just SO MANY PEOPLE, am I right? I mean, sometimes I think if there weren’t so many people to deal with on any given day, life would be kind of sweet. People wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t just always in the way all the time: while driving, working, thinking, in the grocery store, even in the privacy of your own damn home… there are just always people getting in the way! And that’s annoying right? I mean, you take the time to meditate practically every morning to get yourself in the right head space to enjoy your life and then they even manage to get in the way of that! People can be annoying you know, because they’re so slow and oblivious and thinking about themselves instead of me and where I need to be. So rude, right? So I get annoyed with them because, while they’re headed wherever they gotta go, they’re getting in the way of where I’ve gotta go. People are just so self-absorbed these days. Geez. So, I get annoyed. I get annoyed because I’m stressing about something that is not in the present moment and the present moment is taking too damn long. I want to be the type of person who enjoys the present moment, but not this present moment in particular, because there’s not much of interest going on in it, and there’s just so damn much to complain about. All I’m asking for is a perfect moment to relish in so that I can finally be in the moment and enjoy myself, and until that moment comes, I have all the rest of these extraneous life moments to bitch about, because they’re not the present moment I’ve been planning for.

And then there’s STUFF; don’t even get me started about stuff. Stuff gets in the way of happiness even more than people. Whether it’s stuff to do or actual material stuff, it’s just always in the way, needing to be done; chores, appointments, projects – where’s my beach and my tequila, already? You know what, on second thought – getting to the beach will probably end up being way more of a hassle than it’s worth; the cost, the packing, the travel; I'm totally going to get sick, or leave behind something important or have issues with my luggage. I’ll get home more tired than I was before I even left. Grab some beer and pizza and turn on Netflix; I’m going nowhere, ever again. Phew, glad I cleared that up before I was in over my head.

I’m being silly, kinda, but don’t we do this to ourselves all of the time? It’s not that the trip is exhausting or the commute is exhausting or the chores are exhausting – it’s the mental chatter that goes along with it; the complaints when any little thing doesn’t go to plan even though we know that things never go to plan. And yet we persist in making plans because our “to-do list of important life experiences” needs to be checked off, dammit, so better just get on with it and suffer the consequences. But we scarcely reflect on how it’s just our thoughts about things that are making us suffer.

Real pain doesn’t feel like the pain we suffer from in our heads. When your body gets hurt or when you’re in an emergency situation, it feels completely different from the wringer of our minds. A few months ago, I was having an anxious day and I was brooding as I went to pick up my kids. As I distractedly parked, I accidentally reversed when I meant to go forward. I came millimeters from smashing up both my own and one of the others parents cars. The physical rush was immediate; my heart pounded and I became wide eyed and alert. Suddenly, nothing I had been worrying over all day mattered; it had vanished and I was momentarily, completely present. The initial shock of nearly wrecking my car quickly turned to hysterical laughter; I felt so grateful that my near miss had been a miss. This is a minor example of a real situation that draws us into the present; but that feeling of ACTUAL fear over the made up fears I had been mulling over in my brain all day, felt kind of good in comparison, simply because it was real and present, and not made up and distant.

But too many of our stresses ARE made up and distant. In fact many of our stresses don’t need to be stresses at all. We’re trained from a young age to do everything on the clock. I’m not bashing routine but we have such a profoundly neurotic relationship with time. We have to rush everywhere because we organize our days down to the minute. An otherwise arbitrary unit of time (60 seconds) is watched and counted and recounted. No wonder we’re always in a rush. Our ‘present moment’ is always about getting somewhere else. And we never arrive.

If you spend any significant time with kids you realize this trait doesn’t come naturally: it’s trained into us for years by parents, guardians, teachers – whoever’s schedule we happen to be on in any given moment. And kids will work to defeat an adult in this pursuit by any means possible. It’s as if time slows down for a child the minute you ask them to hurry up; their limbs grow heavy; they suddenly remember a hundred different things they need to do/touch/find/talk about the moment they need to hurry anywhere. Kids are the kryptonite to Hurry. And yet, we persist.

We spent a week last summer at a wedding in Jamaica at a truly beautiful resort. On our way back, we had an emergency layover in Cuba due to an issue with the plane's navigational system. Granted, any type of emergency landing is nerve wracking, but we arrived unscathed and waited in the plane to find out if it could be fixed on the spot. After about an hour it was clear that the instrument was going to need to be totally replaced, and we were taken off the plane and put up in another all-inclusive, of a variety I will never forget. From a five star resort in Jamaica to a no-star resort in Cuba, all in the span of a few hours.

In Jamaica the rooms had been airy and sunlit, filled with the scent of the tropical wind and waves; In Cuba the greenish paint was peeling, the room buzzed with the sound of mosquitoes and the ‘king sized’ bed was two singles pushed together. In Jamaica you were greeted with smiling faces by staff who took the time to learn your name and make your kids laugh; in Cuba the staff was simultaneously harried and slow. Everything took forever and nothing was sufficient. In Jamaica there were dozens of restaurants to choose from and 24 hour room service. In Cuba there was what I can only describe as a canteen that looked and smelled like a homeless shelter on Thanksgiving. The food was… I honestly still don’t know if it was food they were serving.

(Note: this is not a commentary on every single resort in Cuba; it just happens to be a quite literal description of the particular resort we were put up in).

You know what my kids did in this nightmarish predicament? Exactly what they had done the entire time we were in Jamaica: they played and chatted, completely absorbed in the moment and barely noticed where they were. Granted they’re kids and don’t have the same responsibilities and concerns (read: hang-ups) as we adults do, but I set to modelling them and began relaxing into the experience life was bringing to me: the landscape was a new one, populated with new sights and new people, new possibility for stories and maybe even adventure. I let my imagination wander to the present beauty rather than dwell on the inconvenience. After all I was there, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it; might as well find something worth remembering. The contrast of the experience, between Jamaica and Cuba became a delicious one. It reaffirmed how lucky I was to have just enjoyed the week I had. I felt lucky that the issue with the plane had been a minor one and we took off and landed safely. I saw my privilege; I saw that the world is wide and filled to the brim with diverse potential experiences. I could have spent the time annoyed and stressed about getting home a day late and spending the night in a shit hole. But I consciously chose to be where I was in that moment, even if it wasn’t what I had chosen.

Yup. Kids – those little effers – sure can teach you a lot when you pay attention. Sometimes (often) my kids talk to me about things I don’t really care about – movies, games, you name it; the gulf between my concerns and theirs is vast and doesn’t show signs of narrowing any time soon. The thing with kids is that everything for them is immediate; so when I pick them up after school and I’m thinking about how I still haven’t got dinner on and how to prioritize homework for the evening and if I can get away without giving them a bath one more night so that I can get them in bed in time for me to chat with my sister on the phone, do some industry reading and maybe squeeze in some yoga before bed; but all they’re thinking about is the game they were just playing in the yard and they need to tell me about it NOW. They don’t care that I’m in a rush, they don’t care that I’ve already asked them five times to put their shoes in their bag and their boots on their feet, they don’t care about any of the stressful situations I've had throughout the day – they just want to tell me about their damn game and come hell or high water, they will tell me about it. In those moments I have two choices: I can space out, get annoyed, and ignore them as I rush them out the door, or I can stand still with them for two minutes (or 120 seconds) while they tell me their stupid story. When I choose the latter I end up accomplishing way more important things than getting back home in the next ten minutes (or 600 seconds): I model patience and listening; I gauge their mood and see where they’re at and if there are any new issues with them that I need to address; I reconnect with them after a long day of separation; and that connection is where the gold lies. It’s where the happy feelings well up. It’s where I look into the eyes of one of the little creatures that I’ve spawned and get to marvel at their existence. I get to stop the business so that I can hug and kiss them and remind them that, no matter what, they’re loved. It hardly takes any time at all and we are soon ready to rush back home as planned, but it makes all the difference. So next time you’re impatient to rush to the next impatient future moment, stop. Like, for a minute. Just one minute. I promise you, you will end up finding a good reason to be exactly where you are.