If you are happy and you know it, just sit down

Happiness.

What is happiness?

Happiness is a term that is now all-too-well-known by those trying to adult. Emphasis on (trying) and emphasis on the term is too-well-known, not necessarily the feeling. And to that point, when did happiness become the ever-elusive goal of life?

Today a friend said “…well, as long as you are happy”. I mean, bless her, I’m glad she wants good things for me, but happiness was never, nor could ever be a constant. It is not a way of life, it is a feeling, an emotion. With happiness comes sadness, anger, remorse, guilt, regret, annoyance, acceptance and a whole slew of feelings and angsty moments and elated adjectives. But, nobody says, “…well, as long as you are angry”, or “…at least you are annoyed”. These are not feelings that are celebrated, these are feelings that are pushed down, to be avoided, to be ignored, to be banished into the pit of feelings that should not be named.

But, here’s a secret folks, all of these feelings exist. They are all necessary, they are all needed and they are all unavoidable.

But, since when did happiness become what we lived for? What happened to family, friends, kids, pets, responsibility, fairness, justice….what happened to a good old reliable sense of obligation?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying to stay in anything where you are (dare I say it), unhappy. Or to better expand on it, confused, lost, scared, indifferent, depressed or resentful. But, I am saying there are gonna be some not-so-good times. Some might be iffy, some might be only okay, some may be just alright and only at a certain hour, or only on a certain day. I don’t think the key to happiness is happiness, I think the key to happiness is being happy with being content.

So, as long as you are content, I’ll be happy.

The Ginga Ninja

 

Coming up Thistles

You know that old saying everything’s coming up roses – well, what happens when everything is coming up, well, not roses? Is it lemons? Is it worms?  Ticks? Nightmares? Daffodils? Toilet Seat Covers??? We definitely have that cliche saying about “when life hands you lemons…” on second thought, how come everything is related to flora? Like what about garbage, water, clouds…when life hands you clouds…sounds catchy – no?

Either way, that old cliché  about roses doesn’t even make sense because roses have thorns. So, maybe whoever thought about that was really thinking…when everything is coming up with the beautiful wonderfulness that can be life, but there is still a thorny little thing to avoid buried underneath…well, that is really life now isn’t it? So, maybe when everything is coming up thistles there is some weird flowerly goodness or beautiful scent just lingering nearby.

I can tell you that my day started out great and very quickly, well, everything started coming up thistles (it’s my new saying and I’m sticking to it). Just one hiccup after the other – one drama, conundrum, temporarily unsolvable problem, letdown, stress inducer and this poor little mind can only handle so many. But, I know, just like I knew yesterday, just like I’ll know tomorrow…I just have to get through the day. Tomorrow starts anew yet again. In the show, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt she says you can survive anything for 10 seconds. So, even in a lengthier bad moment, she just starts over when she reaches 10. Count to ten, begin again.

So, thistles, thorns, fruit, or flowers, well today is today. I gotta just get through head held as high as I can keep it  (without losing it on any poor soul) and be sure to remember that today isn’t tomorrow and tomorrow isn’t yesterday and so on and so forth, motivational blah, blah, blah.

Just checking to see if you are still paying attention. But, seriously, you can weather any storm, there’s always tomorrow, today is the first day of the rest of your life, without the rain there is no rainbow..really, the ending is up to you.

The Ginga Ninja

Cyclical Life…

Hmmm. The wheels in this head have been turning (a dangerous pastime I know). God, I hope somebody out there picked up the Beauty & the Beast reference. Anyway, it’s kind of strange how many things in life are cyclical in nature – the seasons, our social lives, aging, and well…sadly, breakups too.

It’s always been amazing to me how I can feel soooo strange when the seasons change, kind of like a stranger in my own surroundings. I always feel like something is incomplete, something is still coming and there is something whistful and bittersweet about another year that comes and goes, ebbs and flows. BUT, I realize (in reminiscing by reading my old creepy journals), I feel like this every single year. Oh damn, so not even original in my very own life.

I need to remind myself that this weird, thoughtful, almost unexplainable feeling…has happened before and it will happen again. And for anybody joining this conversation late, I just defined the meaning of cyclical.

And ya know what? Feeling the passing of the seasons over and over again isn’t the only thing that reoccurs. I have clued in to the fact that when you are a child you have organization, rules and timelines. You wake up early, go to school, do your homework, go to bed. Life can be fun, but super routine.

As you get older and you start to make friends, you go to their houses, watch movies, get takeout and eventually start throwing raging house parties (or at least pretend to unless you are blessed to be a popular kid). A few years later you try out pubs, bars, expensive restaurants, musicals, brunches and even trendy clubs. Now you know you have made it…THIS is the cool version of life you couldn’t wait to fast-forward to when you bored and sitting in your parents’ basement. Finally kid, you can say you made it.

However….a few years go by and you begin to watch your debt grow as you accumulate assets and realize that you appreciate your friends more than strangers, some good music more than a cramped bar and hanging around in your sweatpa blue jeans more than stilettos. You can afford nice groceries and have learned to cook, preserve, bottle, marinate, ferment, so what surfaces once again? Movies, pre-drinking and houseparties: The Sequel.

Sadly enough, many may even bypass this version of life and go straight to married with a mortgage and (gasp), children. These people then return right back to waking up early, going to work, helping your kids with their homework, and going to bed….

So, this thoughtful red lass can’t help but notice, for all of those out there constantly trying to reach that next goal, benchmark, stone, phase, manic breakdown…remember…well, everything that goes will come again and every feeling you overcome will be back. There is no such thing as perfect and there is no such thing as complete, so I’ll leave you with this deep thought:

Man appears for a little while to laugh and weep, to work and play, and then to go to make room for those who shall follow him in the never-ending cycle. – Aiden Wilson Tozer

….And this funny one:

“The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first; get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating…and you finish off as an orgasm.” – George Carlin

That’s the thing about this bicycle we call life; it’s not that easy to get off.

The Ginga Ninja

 

One Step Forward

The other day I was feeling intense panic. Panic, anxiousness, nervousness, stress…whatever word you want to put to it, but the reality is that I was prepping for a big weekend of hosting and starting to run out of hours in the day. The need to go to the pet store, liquor store, grocery store and Asian veggie vendor was suddenly intensely, ridiculously, unnecessarily necessary and the seconds were ticking down on that old mental clock of mine.

The thing is, I realized that a lot of this was pressure I put on myself. When family visits does your place need to be perfect? And by whose standards is perfect measured?

This little scaredy-cat approach was handed to me by my social anxiety momma. Her heart is in the right place, but maybe not always her head. The need to do every little last thing humanly possible before guests arrive seems to be one that I was inherently taught and inherently think is a real thing.  Truly, they are there for you, not your food, not your clean sheets, not your vacuumed rug or newly trimmed cat. It’s nice to be cleanly, but it’s cleaner to be nice…at least for your brain. (Sure, let’s pretend that one was witty).

I decided in that moment, the intensely asthmatic moment… as I was getting into my car after my final errand, knowing that I may leave myself short on time and scrambling amuck… that I was going to take a step back, lock the car, cross the street and go to a yard sale. A plain, simple, off-the-beaten-path yard sale was enough to bring me back to my youth, to a simpler time, a time where I bought things used, bought them cheap, relished in haggling off 50 cents and simply enjoyed the moment, the weather and the promise of the future. While there, I met a lady who realized I was having an off day and what she said to me was “one step forward” little girl. There are no steps back.

That’s an interesting take on things. Maybe it isn’t two steps forward and one back, just smaller steps forward. What if there were no such thing as steps back? Would it change your outlook on the world? Either way, it sent me away with a sweet little message, a reassurance that nobody is alone, that we keep trying and no matter what, you need to keep walking ahead…no matter how detoured, shaky or limping that walk may be….

The Ginga Ninja

Even shallow cuts still hurt

Why do breakups hurt so much? You were living your life before they came along and for some reason some fool and his fake version of your future is enough to throw you into a tailspin. They love you one day, not the next. How can that be?

And no amount of lamenting, crying, caring or drinking is going to change the outcome. You are only one half of the equation and you can decide to either get up and get on with your life or never let go. Now, what the head knows and the heart feels don’t always align, even when it’s a “no brainer” that you need to move forward – the process and transition can still be a difficult one. Now, I have successfully let go of my ex-bf of 4 years and the one prior to that of 2.5. I don’t particularly like seeing their photos with wives, girlfriends or houses, nor do I especially love getting messages still from an ex mom-in-law to be. But, the pain of losing them (well, letting go and then later second-guessing) and the feelings of missing them are long gone.  No, now I’m struggling to let go of my bf of 5 months.

5 months hardly seems enough to miss. They never had the chance to fully become part of your life or fully know you and what makes you tick. But, the visions of the future to come started to build and therefore, so did the actions you took in your daily life. Constant contact, sweet words and gestures, saving towards a future – these are all things you do not have without them. Will you get them again?  Perhaps. Will it be a better or worse match? Only time will tell.  But, I can tell you that the older you get, often the more accelerated the relationship. So, sadly, it can be almost as hard to let go of a short, but serious one as it is to let go of a long, but detached one.  The pain feels the same, but hopefully the timeframe doesn’t.

I know a couple that had to leave a 10 year marriage and 18 years of memories. That ended 5 years ago and they still grieve at times. It’s amazing how hard those chemicals in our brains can hang on. It’s amazing how poor our ability to just shut out the past is. Unless you have a lot of practice. And unfortunately for me, I have a long memory, and my ex-bf…well, he’s had a lot of practice. Sometimes it would be nice to get a temporary lobotomy like the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” because we start fresh, we start anew. We start eager for love and untarnished by pain. Our walls are low and our egos aren’t bruised. Our hopes are high and our sense of self is still strong. I would love to start over 15 years old and do it all different. I would love to start over never needing the white picket fence or the validation of another, but sadly, this is something I cannot truly do. You can’t undo your past, but you can…

Well, you write the ending.

The Ginga Ninja

 

 

The Best Things in Life Aren’t Free

Money makes the world go round. It’s sad, but hell, it’s true. Truer than true in fact. There are so many old sayings about money that it’s not even funny (maybe I should go back to sad), but that’s because it is so integral to our everyday life. Long gone are the days where you forage the land for food, trade services for survival or even when just having one income, one car in the garage and a roof over your head were the definition of success.

No, today success comes in many forms. Unfortunately the most obvious being vacations, wealth and things. Do we really need so many things? Should there really be at a minimum THREE television shows about hoarding?  And since when did “likes” on Facebook mean more than actually liking your own life? Who cares if somebody else likes that you went to a concert or how you set up your new coffee table, isn’t all that matters that you do?

I’m as guilty as the rest of them. I’ve had periods of being pretty “modern-day” poor and I can worry like a champ. I can splurge and spend as well as I can save and thrift.  The funny thing when it comes to wealth is it’s all about liquidity. How much do you have access to at any one time? For some reason that integral point seems to be the defining factor between perceived wealth and actual.

I am as poor as I’ve probably ever been – don’t own a house, still have loans to pay, yet for some reason have started handing out dolla bills as though I’m a big deal. I think it’s because suddenly that money is in my hand and it is my choice as to whether it goes to debt, vacation, entertainment, stuff or savings. It is up to me what percentage goes where and for some reason, this empowering feeling is a misconception of being successful. In reality, I am no better off than when I made less money and spent less on things, food and “stuff” – but it’s all about quality of life, all about how much it feels like I have, not actually about how much I have on paper (well, online statement, let’s be green here).

It got me thinking. I have a very wealthy family member…remarried and up to his eyeballs in debt, yet the fact that he has an enviable yearly income makes him seem untouchable beyond compare. On a daily basis I also see homeless vagabonds – holes in their mittens, scuffs on their shoes, pride on their signs; begging with their coffee cups. That hobo, that scruffy bum with $10 in hand is in truth wealthier than that lawyer, doctor, entertainer or dentist with debt. It’s not about what you have on paper, but in theory, right?

Well, once upon a time credit wasn’t accessible, credit cards didn’t exist and people didn’t need so much space or so many things. Toys were baseballs and ragdolls, cardboard swords, tree forts and old bicycles. Once upon a time there was no social media – nobody cared about your boring trip to see your grandparents in Florida, or the time you went camping. Vacations for me were roadtrips, summer jaunts, campgrounds and cabins. There was no European cruise, or South American jungle tour. There was no credit card for kids or even education funds to prep us for the all important (and expensive) education we are now forced to obtain.

That brings me back around to where we started – money makes the world go round. Whether you are happy or sad often depends on money, which is too bad. But, all those things that make you happy – books, gaming stations, vacations in the sun, hell, even heat for your house – well, they all cost money. So, though money can’t buy you happiness, it can buy you the things that make you happy.

Oh the sad, sad irony.

“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”   – Groucho Marx

The Ginga Ninja

Time for a Wake up Call

Is it normal to hear the song “You Make My Dreams Come True” by the great Hall & Oates TWICE in one day?  Somehow, I think not.  In fact, is it normal to hear this catchy 80’s diddy, 6 times in a month?  I know not.  Is the universe trying to tell me something?

I recently had a job where every manager seemed to get pregnant shortly after starting the job.  I was warned to be careful, or I may be next.  I gave a little giggle because to get pregnant there’s a little secret (shhh)….to get pregnant, you have to be having sex.

As a woman who is up to her ears in rehab, consultation projects, cleaning her own apartment, interviewing, visiting friends and family, back at the gym and caring for pets…well, boys haven’t really been given a ton of time until recently. And you know what?  They seem to be a pretty big waste of it if I’m honest.

But, are all of these warnings and the crazy sign of hearing “You Make My Dreams Come True” trying to tell me something?  Should I be preparing for a life change, or….should I decide that the plain and simple message of that song is simply about me this time.  Maybe I make my dreams come true.  Plain and simple, isn’t that really the only person who can do that for you anyways?

For a long time…a really long time…I didn’t get that.  I didn’t understand that it wasn’t just a matter of being okay single or feeling confident when alone, but being okay alone.  For real.  Whether there is another person in your future or not, you have to stop envisioning one where another person exists and just try to be happy in yourself no matter where, when, or who that may be with.  Stop feeling like you have a void to fill and get ready for a much better problem – trying to actually make time in your busy and fulfilled life for another someone.

In a nutshell, “I make my dreams come true”…and if you are reading this, well, right now YOU are the only other one making my dreams come true because dammit, I kind of really like this writing thing.  So, go out and drink, dance, sing, cry, laugh, ponder, shake, fear, love and risk all the things that make you happy, but do it with the awareness that the outcome may not change your tomorrow.  It is the comfort, the acceptance, the challenge and the knowledge of these things, these pieces of you, that make life worthwhile.

Charlotte honey, did you ever stop to think that maybe we’re the white nights and we have to save ourselves? – Carrie, Sex and the City

The Ginga Ninja

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