I began this post with the words “You’re going to be late”. After reading through my rough draft, I realized I really disliked the beginning. It wasn’t the story I was trying to tell. I left in here, because I simply didn’t want to take the time to write another opening paragraph, but I also decided to write this short snippet to precede my flawed introduction. This post doesn’t feel complete. It’s a topic I’ve written on three times now and I feel like there’s just so much more to it. My reasoning for that is because I probably confuse happiness with about fifteen other topics that don’t necessarily need to be grouped into the same post, but I always feel they go hand-in-hand. Life is a really strange thing, but death is even stranger. We know nothing after your heart stops beating. You can believe in whatever religion you want, but the truth is we just have no scientific backing for what happens. The older we get, the more we experience death. I see its impact on others – loved ones, family, friends, complete strangers – and I try to express empathy and take the time to put myself in their shoes. I think about what they’re going through and I think about life as a whole. Is there regret in someone dying? Is there nothing but remembrance of the good times? It affects every individual differently. Eventually, everyone learns to continue living. Life continues to play its course and knock people around over and over again. I’ll talk about Morrie a lot in this post. He talks about how he never really got over the loss of his mother; still thinking about her during his finally moments. He talks about how he regretted never forgiving his good friend, Norman and how he regretted never having said goodbye when Norman lost his life to pancreatic cancer. He teaches Mitch important lessons in life – discussing all the topics we spend a lot of our time thinking about and acting upon – death, fear, aging, greed, marriage, family, society, forgiveness, and a meaningful life. If you’ve never read this book, please grab a copy. It’s literally $3.99 on EBay and it’s so much better than classics like Slaughterhouse Five or The Road. Trust me, you’ll feel a lot. I suppose a meaningful life is what the majority of this post eludes to. There’s a lot to learn through sadness and I spent a lot of time thinking about everything as it relates over the course of the past five days. As a result, this is what you’re left with..
You’re going to be late. You know you should have gotten out of bed ten minutes earlier, but you hit the snooze button and spent an extra seven minutes shaving your face ever so delicately to avoid irritating your skin. On second thought, you probably shaved faster than normal and ended up spending an extra minute cleaning up that tiny bit of blood that wouldn’t seem to stop oozing from your newly ripped skin. You get dressed, grab your belongings, and head out the door. You get in your car and quickly run through a list of things in your head to make sure you have everything you need for the day. Then you hit a red light. You find yourself getting angry at traffic you cannot control. You find your first words of the day are, yet again, another set of curse words directed at someone with no name in a 2008 Chevy Impala. Finally passing by this driver you think to offer some universal sign language in the direction of the driver seat, but instead just end up giving a look of disgust over your shoulder as you accelerate to ten miles over the speed limit. When all is said and done, you failed. You’re five minutes late for work. Your day is already off to a terrible start. Terrible.
Maybe you can’t relate to this example, but maybe you can think of times where things just didn’t go your way. I lost a GoPro during the last three minutes of a white water rafting trip this past week. I had to check a bag at the airport the other day on a connecting flight and pick it up from baggage claim in order to run to my next gate. I had a friend cry in my arms. And I experienced the death of a childhood bestie.
Sometimes life doesn’t seem to go our way and we get caught up in the little things. As I sat at the airport the other day, waiting for my 12:13 pm return flight home, the gate agent came over the loud speaker with news that the flight would be delayed roughly 45 minutes due to icy conditions and connections might be affected in Chicago. I watched a roughly 45-year old, glutenous, man in an Ohio State shirt (fitting) curse to himself under his breath multiple times before going to the ticket counter with questions he already knew the answers to. I laughed. I thought how silly it was for him to be upset over something so small. But then I caught myself again – wondering if his reasoning for going to Chicago or the importance of connecting onto another flight was more significant than mine. I’ll never know.
Often I find myself getting upset over shit that doesn’t really matter. When I listened to Jay Williams speak this past week about the death of Kobe Bryant, I felt something that eased my soul. “Let that shit go.” Those were the simple words he said referring to anger and grudges people may have against others or even objects, ideas, or happenings in their lives. Jay Williams was a promising prospect out of Duke who almost had his life snagged away from him after his rookie season with the Bulls due to a motorcycle accident. He had a first-hand experience with an accident that wasn’t supposed to happen – and one that could have very easily ended his life just as it did Kobe Bryant’s. I think about the people who passed away in a split second and I think about the pain that those who knew them best are suffering from. It makes my day-to-day problems feel much less significant. So why do we waste our time with such small issues? I was also moved when Shaq addressed the world by expressing his condolences. With tears in his eyes, Shaq thought about the last time he spoke to Kobe years ago. The well documented feud they had as players did not matter. In that moment, Shaq had regret. He wished he would have reached out and said more over the years. He acknowledged being busy – working too much and sleeping too little – the things we think of when we think of successful people in America. But Shaq didn’t seem successful here. He looked like a man full of sadness and regret. Even though their relationship wasn’t always perfect, Shaq wished he could turn back time and tell his brother he loved him before he passed. Sadly, life doesn’t give us that opportunity. We don’t get to choose when people leave.
I recently read Tuesdays with Morrie, a Mitch Albom memoir, and it couldn’t have fallen in my lap at a better time. There’s not a character in literature that I loved hearing philosophy from more than Morrie. His perspective on life, death, love, relationships, happiness, and much more all struck me with significance as I spent two afternoons flipping through the pages. From November to January, up until the 29th, I had finished just one book. I suppose I got caught up with the holidays, but in all reality I spent more time on social media, paying attention to meaningless sporting events, and talking to women than I would like to admit. I tried to force myself to eat healthy the first three weeks of January and head to the gym and spent a week in Costa Rica for vacation. Then, on my way back, I was hit with the tragic news of Kobe’s death, and more impacting, that of a childhood friend’s. It was an emotional day. I didn’t hold back tears, but I didn’t feel the need to cry either. My eyes felt heavy at times, but I mostly just thought about the things that I’m going to talk about in this post: life, death, choosing positivity, and seeking happiness.
“(speaking of a friend) He gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, those were the best years of his life, ’cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn’t learn a thing.” – Steve Carrell, Little Miss Sunshine
I love this quote above. The scene in the movie is Steve Carrell trying to reassure Paul Dano that, even though his dreams have been crushed and the world seems to be aspiring against him, the suffering matters. Ironically, he’s trying to make Paul Dano feel better (happy!) and a smile shortly follows from a character who has been bitter, distant, and mute up to this point in the film. I know I’ve stated it many times before, but I couldn’t stress it enough: happiness is essential for a quality life. This world is going to do things to you that you won’t believe, but if we put our lives into perspective, it could always be worse. Why is it that one person with a stable job, a 250 thousand dollar salary, a wardrobe of designer clothing, and a new Ferrari be more upset than someone whose living in a house with no door or plumbing system, sharing hand-me-downs amongst his children in rural Costa Rica? There’s clearly a tremendous difference in personal values. Notice earlier I said “put our lives into perspective” rather than “comparing our lives to others”. I was careful with my choice of words, because too much of our modern world is looked at in comparison. Women think they’re not thin enough. Men think they’re not rich enough. All of us think we aren’t worth enough. It’s sad. Extremely sad. We compare our lives to the highlights we see on social media and forget that every person struggles with their own issues. Your presence on social media and online platforms makes it easy to forget that life isn’t perfect. You could look at my Instagram right now and get all the highlights of my life. You’d probably say “God, he travels so much” or “Ugh, he always looks so happy”. Well truth is I’m not and half the time I post pictures of me traveling their just highlights of past vacations. I spend time in new cities every day with my job and often don’t even get the chance to explore. I’m not saying my life isn’t enjoyable, I’m just saying that I go through my own shit like everybody else and I take off the mask by writing short, little blogs like this to let you know I’m human. Surely, I get upset. I try to suppress things after a few hours, because I know eventually they will seize to matter. Life is bigger than losing a GoPro or being pissed off at traffic. Yet every single day I watch these small nuances destroy all positive thinking and enrage people. How do we fix that in our society? How can we make people realize that perspective is everything and it’s something we can easily control?
You can choose happiness. Sometimes, it will be a tough choice to make. Other times, it will be impossible to feel any emotion other than sadness or fear. But in the end, if you really focus on what’s important to milk out of life, I hope you’ll choose happiness.
It doesn’t take long for me to understand why someone isn’t happy. As we get older, life just gets harder. Our thoughts are more complex and we process things in a way we never would have even imagined as children. I talked about Tuesdays with Morrie earlier and I must mention that there were several times as I followed the words on those pages where I felt tears pool in eyes. I read significant literature as a kid (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Heartbreaking Work of A Staggering Genius, etc.), but I couldn’t even begin to tell you how I processed these works. Life was so easy and all that mattered was sports, grades, and my girlfriend. I didn’t have to worry about money, retirement, death, dating, mental health, car insurance, my career, cooking my own meals, taxes, or life in general. Life was so easy. Its lack of complexity made it easy to be happy. Everything seemed new and big. My biggest stressor was preparing for a sporting event. Happiness was inevitable for me, but even thinking back on it now I don’t think that was the case for everyone. People likely envied things about me. I envy how easy things used to be and how perfect it seemed I had it. Nowadays, things return from my past that I just struggle to let go of. I struggle to forgive myself for getting arrested. I struggle to cope with seemingly ruining my back. I hate the fact that I treated a girl so poorly that we both spent the majority of our time together breaking eachother’s hearts. When I get down, all these things come back. It’s like a spotlight illuminates over the things I try to bury deep in back of my mind. And still, when I put my life into perspective, I know it could be so much worse. I have friends who grew up without two parents, friends who struggle with mental health issues, friends who experienced the death of a sibling, and now a friend who himself has passed. So yeah, I understand the difficulty in choosing to be happy at times. It’s not the same as when we were kids.
I’d be foolish to think there aren’t any positives in aging though. We are all human beings, capable of learning, and wisdom makes us a hell of a lot more interesting. I enjoy being able to process things in a different way now than when I was 11, 18, or 25. The ability to learn, forgive, trust, and forget are all essential as we move forward in life. It helps us make sense of the happenings. Last year I read a few self-help books about pursuing excellence. Sadly, we spend a lot of time basing our idea of excellence off other’s beliefs and society’s values. As we get older it becomes easier to stray away from the mythical doctrines and formulate our own meaning of life and how we choose to spend it. We’re required to abide by rules that everyone seems to agree upon which makes it easier to practice beliefs we find to be standard. Recreational drugs are bad, but prescription drugs are okay if a doctor says so. People feel guilty for having sex sometimes even though mammals have all evolved with a drive to reproduce. Each religion possesses aspects that don’t seem right, but most people still think they have to adopt all beliefs in order to practice. To an extent, we’ve let society brainwash all of us. The development of human beings as a whole seems cult-like: we follow made up rules within made up countries and states that we must abide by or we become prisoners of those who exercise governance. Explain that to an outside species and maybe they disagree. Or maybe order is necessary. Who really knows. We avoid doing a lot of these things, because we could end up being punished or put in jail, but so many other things we avoid because we’re afraid to be looked down upon. We fear dancing in public because we may look like fools in the eyes of others. We refuse to tell people how we really feel, because small talk is common tongue and society says not to put our burdens on someone else. These aren’t laws and they’re not things we are required to abide by, yet there are so many examples of times that we simply choose to “fit in”. The older I have become (28 now and feeling pretty gray), the more I think about this. About three years ago I decided money didn’t matter because experience was the most valuable thing you could have on this earth. I wanted to be happy and I wanted to do something that I enjoyed. That meant success for me. Most people grow up, go to school, go to work for forty years, and die. I want a story much greater than that when I die. I want to spend my time seeing the world, having meaningful conversations, and spending time with quality people that genuinely make me feel good. When I watched it as an adult, I felt like Robin Williams was talking to me in Good Will Hunting when he unloads his wisdom on Will. No, I’m not comparing myself to the genius Will Hunting was, but the way that Robin Williams articulates maturity, understanding, and living a worthwhile life is fascinating. A girl once told me, “Good Will Hunting is every guys favorite movie”. While we know that’s not true, it probably should be (definitely top five). In my mind, age and experience generate wisdom and understanding. I’ll leave the quote here for you to process.
Sean: “So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You’re a tough kid. And I’d ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, “once more unto the breach dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I’d ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms “visiting hours” don’t apply to you. You don’t know about real loss, ’cause it only occurs when you’ve loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you… I don’t see an intelligent, confident man… I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart. You’re an orphan right?
[Will nods]
Sean: You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally… I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can’t learn anything from you, I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t want to do that do you sport? You’re terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.”
There’s much more to this quote then what I try and compare it to in this blog. Will had no desire to act on his genius, because all he ever wanted was to fit in. As a 19-year old kid, he probably bottled up much more emotion than I ever had, so I can hardly relate. A lot of us won’t fully live, even when we die. There was so much more to life for Kobe Bryant and my friend Brent that they will never get to experience. We are so, so lucky to have the opportunity to be where we are today, where ever you may be sitting, reading this post, because we simply have more time. Spend it wisely. It’s easy to forget people – it doesn’t even matter whether or not they had a significant impact on the world. I doubt most the world mourned the creator of the microwave when he died, but we still use the damn thing almost every day. So why should our image matter so much to the rest of the world? Be your true-self and be present for those who love you back. Forget what society says and how they judge and choose to be the good person you want to be – however you define that. Gather with family and friends and share that happiness. Share it with strangers and, eventually, pass that wisdom down. When you break it down, you don’t want to be a person who worked most hours of the day, made a lot of money they didn’t get the chance to spend, didn’t take the time to fully engage and express love, struggled with anxiety and depression, or failed to foster meaningful relationships. I don’t know the science behind it, but I imagine your mindset will be much more effective than any pill a doctor could prescribe. Believe you’re in control. Choose to live a life worth living.
I currently have 18 books in my checkout cart on EBay. It’s excessive and extremely impulsive, but art is my form of therapy. I love watching movies, listening to music, or reading books when I’m looking to feel emotion. And I love to write when I’m feeling emotional myself. I go through phases where music matters most or books seem more significant. At the beginning of January I seemed to focus all my attention on music and mindlessly work my way through the book, Gang Leader for a Day (To be honest, the main character was just so naive I told myself I shouldn’t like him. I wanted to connect in an emotional way, but the scholarly author made the book more about urban poverty than connecting to characters. It was educational, but not what I needed). Mac Miller’s Circles album was on repeat and after the discovery of No Hard Feelings by The Avett Brothers, Halsey, and a couple slower Lumineers songs, I was doing nothing but deciphering lyrics in my head. I find it easy to relate to music if I solely focus on lyrics and my personal beliefs about life, love, and relationships. Of course, a good melody complements nicely. I watched 1917 shortly after it premiered in theaters and thought, “okay, the British Saving Private Ryan with a bit less action and length”. It was a worthwhile watch, but there was no joy. I think I set myself up for an emotional month and the recent tragedies didn’t kindly warn me of their presence, as life hardly ever does.
However, we must move on. Of course, take the time to mourn whatever wrongdoings life may present you with, but ultimately choose to carry on. If we believe our lives will be full of nothing but trauma and tragedy, then we’ll truly leave no time for happiness. Don’t put negative thoughts in your head. Don’t tell people you’re broken, or worthless, or too messed up, or too depressed and anxious to function. The more you say it, the more you’ll believe it and fall into the downward spiral I’ve found myself crawling up from far too many times. The most amazing thing about psychology is that we are somewhat in control. My favorite thing about philosophy is we get to choose what to believe in. If we’re able to tell ourselves that everything is going to be okay, as we know it almost always is, then we begin to believe it. Things become easier to process and move forward with. When life offers you a choice, choose happiness. Choose love. Choose kindness and empathy. Share everything you can that brings a smile to another person’s face. Never be afraid to reach out to anybody who has had a significant impact on you. Sometimes the smallest things mean the most to people in times of need. Apply the golden rule to all aspects of life and try to be there for others just as you’d want someone to be there for you. There’s an art to staying positive and I don’t think it’s unaccompanied by bad days, tears, and unshakable sadness. Those are all things we have to process, but as I’ve said before, life is far too short to spend more days in sadness than with joy.
When you’re traveling around the world you see and hear the words of Alexander Supertramp from Into the Wild each and every day: “happiness is only real when shared”. Please, share happiness. Everyone will struggle, but everyone deserves to spend the best days of their lives here on earth because it’s the only thing we’re certain of. In the case of Morrie, there are people who are given an end date before they pass. He made the best of it by sharing joy through his philosophy and life lessons. The unfortunate reality of life, that Morrie also eludes to, is that most people don’t get the opportunity to work around a deadline. And what is it that you remember before you die? I like to believe you remember the highlights of your life – maybe it’s winning a significant sporting event, marrying, or having your first kid – but I also believe you remember the immediate things. Where you were the following Monday and what your best friend said to you the night before when you hung up the phone. Don’t miss the opportunities. Don’t regret things. Learn to forgive people, trust people, and let go of things that breed negativity. Take control of everything in life you can. Use your power to spread joy and live a life of happiness by excluding everything that doesn’t deserve a place. Your past does not define you. Bad times are temporary. You will persevere. Your future is brighter than you could ever imagine.
“You drown not by falling into the river, but by staying submerged in it.” – Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
LifeAfterLopez 