I don’t know when we all decided to get on a group hamster wheel to nowhere and never get off, but I do know this race towards something and nothing can often lead to feeling disconnected and wiped. I’m a deep feeler—Enneagram 4—so when I get disconnected from my heart it’s bad news. Nothing devastating, except that I forget the “why” of being here which is not great because meaning and higher purpose are what drive me in my core.
What drives you? How do you feed it? Is it chasing happiness, power, feeling loved, admired? How do you keep your mind’s eye on what motivates you and be aware of it in tandem with the speed and demands of daily life?
Movies work for me as a channel back to my heart when I’ve run away from it for a little too long. I rewatched “About Time” this weekend and it ended with me in tears and I call that a success. The protagonist is a man who has inherited an ability to time travel from his father. At first he clunkily puts it to use, rewinding to make himself sound better in front of a teen crush, helping a friend with a work problem, and other juvenile impulses. Eventually though, he meets the love of his life, gets married, matures.
His time traveling gift comes with a twist. When big events happen—like a birth, or a wedding—he can’t go back to before those moments because it will prevent them from happening again. So when his dad dies around the same time his wife is about to have a baby, he realizes he will never be able to time-jump back to see him again.
The son takes himself back to one last ping pong game with his father. It’s his last time seeing him. Ever. If you’ve lost someone close to you and knew they would die while they were still alive I know you know what that gut punch feels like.
During their last match the son asks the dad if there’s anything he’d like to do and the dad says he wants to take a walk. Together they travel back in time, to a sunny day when the boy is just a kid. They spend the entire day at the beach, skipping rocks and getting dirty and watching the tide come in. They hold hands. They hug.
These are the things we should notice. All the other noise—the inbox, the scheduling, the worrying over things out of our control—is just background fodder. Let it go. I promise you will not get to the end of your life and concern yourself over whether or not someone liked you or if you said the wrong thing or forgot to answer that email.
“Do you want to know the big secret or would you rather find out by yourself like I did,” the dad asks his son. His big secret is the formula for happiness, and the boy lets him tell him what it is. “Get on with ordinary life, living it day by day like everyone else,” the dad says. The scene cuts to the son in the middle of the workday, ordering a takeaway lunch from a cashier, hardly making eye contact with her, in a frenetic rush, riding home on the train irritated by a passenger listening to loud music. Bad day, he tells his wife as she turns off the light.
His dad’s second part of the formula is for the son to go back to that day. “Live every day again, almost exactly the same. The first time with all the tensions and worries that stop us from noticing how sweet the world can be. But the second time, noticing.”
The son takes himself back to the day to do it over again. The second time around he helps his friend find humor in a challenging moment. He smiles at the cashier and looks her in the eye. He savors the beautiful building he works in. He hugs his coworkers. He enjoys the music in the train. He tells his wife he had a very good day. They joke and laugh.
This is the good stuff. This is what we’re here for.
Every moment of every day we have a choice on how to take the world in. Do we focus on the nuisances, the irritations, or the difficult people in our life? Or do we bask in the beautiful moments, like watching someone’s eyes light up when they tell a story, really listening to our partner or our friend or our child, or taking pause for a moment to play?
I live in Minnesota and last week it snowed 15 inches in 36 hours. Nothing groundbreaking but enough to wreak havoc on traffic, close school, and deter me from going anywhere for the day which was not what I had originally planned. I started the morning reversing my SUV into our alley and promptly wedged it into a snowbank. I had two choices: be pissed or laugh. I chose the latter. Together with my helpful neighbor, my three sons, and four pieces of scrap wood, we shoveled and spun and dug the car out of the snow ditch and actually had fun doing it.
Happiness is not a destination we arrive at by checking things off our to-do list or keeping up with the pace of the world, a speed that’s unattainable long-term, one that often disinhibits us from noticing what’s going on around us. Happiness is a choice in every moment of every day and we all have the power to select it. To sink in deep. To soak up the awe and wonder it provides.
I don’t define happiness as some fleeting feeling of cheerfulness. My version of happiness is being present to how god damn beautiful the world is. All of it. The pain, the joy, the funny moments, the sad ones too. Happiness can take all of these parts of being human and shape-shift them into moments when we are alive. Who doesn’t want more of that?
Sometimes, though, we do need a simple meal to fall back on when life gets too busy. I’ve been making this baby bok choy recipe from the NY Times for years. It’s simple. It’s healthy, And because I fork-and-knife it like a steak, it demands I use two hands. That means no phone, no book, no computer. Just me, enjoying a simple meal, noticing how much I love ginger and garlic and tender leafy greens.
What are you going to notice today? I’m noticing how much I appreciate you taking the time to read this. xo
Soundtrack:
Food for Thought:
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson