Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. ~ Aristotle

The Importance of Happy Places

It’s important to have happy places, places you can retreat to when you need to recharge yourself. These places can be big or small, can be major adventures or minor step backs for a minute to breathe. It’s important to have small places you can fall back to for a few minutes or a half and hour to just breathe. For me, there’s always a pizza place in my life where I can hide away and eat a really good pizza and have a coke.

It’s always good to have those intermediate places if you can, for me right now and one that has been a place for me for a very long time has been both Monterey and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, particularly the jellyfish room.

Monterey Bay Aquarium

I’m an ocean junkie from way back, as a kid I was absolutely fascinated by the Jacques Cousteau specials on TV. I would come to love snorkeling and being on the ocean. I wanted to become a marine biologist like a million other people. I trained to be a fresh water biologist instead and would eventually end up doing some marine fisheries development work at one point in my career. I also take every chance to be around whales, whether that is basic whale watches or adventures in Baja with Grey Whales.

On my very first trip to California I went to Monterey because it seemed like a really amazing place. In fact it was everything I had hoped and the aquarium blew me away. I vowed to live there some day, it took fourteen years but I lived in the Monterey area for three years, it was amazing. Currently I live ninety minutes away so it’s become my intermediate retreat.

One of my bigger happy places has become the Mojave Desert. I lived there for a couple of years and really fell in love with the desert. I would often retreat to Anza Borrego State Park and it for a time became my runaway place for my hardest time each year, the week between Christmas and New Years. Recently I discovered a Nevada State Park in the Mojave, Valley of Fire State Park and it’s become my new go to winter hideaway.

The thing about happy places is there restorative value. These need to be places where you can simply be, and therefore can be yourself, free from judgement and deadlines and the expectations of others. Preferably places where the phone can’t ring or if it can, places where you’re absolutely comfortable turning it off. The jellyfish room in the Monterey Bay Aquarium is such a special place for me. Watching the jellies swim is absolutely mesmerizing, and for a few minutes on this last trip I had the room to myself, no humans to interrupt my experience and it was absolutely exactly what I needed. I followed that up with a trip to the Mojave, not my usual, but a couple of days at a hot springs spa. What was perfect about this stop was that I had a hot springs tub in my room, so I could fill it up and just soak in my room with some music playing low, it was amazing.

I truly needed some time in my happy places, I needed to wind down from humanity. It hasn’t brought me all the way back to level, but it has helped tremendously. I hope you have the opportunity to get to one of your happy places soon my friends, they lead to happy days. ~ Rev Kane