In our lives we have people who like us. People who enjoy our company, who enjoy doing certain activities with us or just enjoy an opportunity to chat with us. But there’s a small sub-set of people who no matter what, are always happy to see you. Now I know, a lot of you immediately thought of parents, but they don’t fit into this group. You see at some point parents have to direct and chastise you, keep you from doing something you don’t want to do, for your own good usually.
Grandparents often fall into this role, they get to spoil you, wind you up and go home. Uncle’s like me get to do that as well, most of the time. But there’s that handful of people who are just always happy to see you. Soon I’ll be doing a post about my 90 year-old friend Marv, he’s one of those people, a really amazing guy.
What’s even rarer is to have one of these people who have known you your whole life. My granny was one, no matter how shitty life was, or what she was going through, as soon as she saw me, she would break into a smile. Today I got a phone message from my mom, one of these people, her name was Martha, passed away on Monday. My earliest memories of her were when my granny worked as a custodian with her husband at the local junior high. But given she was close to my godmother, I’m quite sure she knew me from birth. In all of my nearly 59 years I never remember a time when her first reaction to me wasn’t a smile, a big hello and a hug. Our conversations were always easy and full of joy, that kindness and joy is contagious so my reaction to her was always the same.
I didn’t spend a lot of time with her ever, we would only see each other once a year or so when I visited my family in the East. But regardless of the time that had gone by, or the circumstances, there was always a smile, always joy in seeing each other.
As you get older, there are fewer and fewer of these type of people in your life and so the loss of each one is felt more and more, you will be missed, rest in peace my friend. ~ Michael
What’s the line, trust but verify, which is a way of saying don’t trust anybody. So in putting together my post for next week I went back over my post history and it’s not my 11th, but my 13th anniversary on the blog! My good friend Bryan had texted saying he thought it had been longer, and obviously he was right.
Happy Anniversary – Ministry of Happiness
So I got my notification this week from my blog platform that I’ve hit the 11th anniversary of the Ministry of Happiness blog. This reminder always catches me by surprise and makes me happy. A quick reminder for those of you who haven’t been along for the whole ride. I originally started writing this blog as a way of getting out the information I’d researched related to happiness as a way of overcoming my own depression. I figured at the time I’d get maybe a year out of the blog and then move on to doing something else. This effort however turned into a surprisingly wonderful experience. I got a lot of positive comments about what I was writing and some people were even helped by me relaying my ideas and experiences. So I went past a year, then another and another and here we are in beginning year twelve.
The blog has changed over time. It was initially more focused on happiness research and providing inspiring comments and memes. It morphed over time to talk more about what’s happening in my life and the happiness and quality of life lessons I can pull from what happens in my life. That, and whenever I get the chance a dose of notes and photos from my travels.
So thank you all for continuing to read the blog, to sign up up and subscribe and comment on the posts. You really don’t understand for blog writers how much we truly appreciate your comments on posts, thank you so much for taking the time to comment. I remember when I started I was talking with a friend about a blog he had, he had 40 subscribers, I was blown away and couldn’t ever imagine having that many. So a huge thank you to the 245 people who subscribe to this blog and are actually willing to have every one of these posts show up in their inbox.
It’s been a big week, there have been a lot of good things going on. I got the reminder of the anniversary, I got the largest paycheck of my life which included my annual raise, and I got to eat the first tomato from my garden this year, it was delicious.
So thank you all very much and I hope you have a great week and a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. ~ Alfred Austin
I mentioned this in a post a few weeks ago, for the first time in a long time I have the opportunity to grow a garden. Sure, it’s a patio garden in containers but I’m just excited to be growing things. I’m growing a variety of herbs and vegetables but most importantly of all, I’m growing tomatoes. I’m not sure you can understand the joy I felt when I saw my first small tomatoes out there. It will be outdone only by the joy I’ll have when I bite into the first ripe tomato.
Growing tomatoes has a really deep connection and resonance with me. I’ve been gardening since I was five years old and demanded space in the family garden to grow radishes. Ever since then, whenever possible I’ve had a garden. My grandfather taught me how to grow tomatoes and roses. I didn’t really have an interest in roses but he suckered me in by pointing out the first step to growing roses was to go fishing. I did a lot of fishing as a kid. So we dug holes for the rose bushes, then we went fishing and brought back fish to throw in the holes as fertilizer, planting the roses over top of the fish. Up until his death at 90, he grew both roses and tomatoes every year.
He had a particular ritual related to the first ripe tomato every year. He would open a bottle of beer, grab his salt shaker and to quote him, “eat that tomato like an apple.” I honor him every year by following that ritual. So this little patio garden means a lot. Here are some photos of its current progress.
This weekend I had the pure joy of eating a bowl of salad purely from the garden.
It was small but it was fantastic! Have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
And a photo update, a ripening tomato, I’m so excited!
You know, you could kind of call this post a greatest hits list. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about adventure, I’m entering year five at my job and over the last 15 years I haven’t worked more than three years in a row, so I’m feeling a bit boxed in, at least for another 18 months, which honestly feels as long as this sentence. So tonight, some reminiscing and yes I linked that to the song from the 70’s.
Cycling in Ireland – Three times I’ve done an amazing cycling trip in the Galway region of Ireland, it’s a really spectacular piece of the world.
Rev Kane in Ireland
Hugging Grey Whales in Mexico – I took some time down in Baja to spend a week spotting grey whales. Amazingly, the interactions we had were fantastic and the most amazing of all, I go to hug an 80,000 pound grey whale in the wild.
Photographing Polar Bears in Canada – I spent five days in Churchill, Manitoba, the polar bear capital of the world. For three days I photographed polar bears and checked off a giant bucket list item when I saw the northern lights for the first time. Not only saw them, but saw an unbelievable display.
Swimming with Whale Sharks – I took an afternoon one day while in Atlanta to sleep with the whale sharks in the Georgia Aquarium.
Walking the Appalachian Trail – I hiked a thousand miles of the Appalachian Trail, wrote a book about it, Appalachian Trail Happiness and made some amazing friends.
Awesome, Backtrack, Rev Kan, and the Kingfisher
Living in Oaxaca – I spent three months living in Oaxaca, Mexico and absolutely fell in love with the place. It is a center for the Day of the Dead (DOTD) in Mexico and the first place I bought a piece of DOTD art from.
Havasupai Falls – The first lottery hike I’ve ever done, it took me three weeks of calling daily to score a slot. Havasupai Falls sits at the edge of the Grand Canyon and was one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been.
Havasu Falls
Petra, Wadi Rum and The Dead Sea – This trip to Jordan checked off two huge bucket list items, floating in the Dead Sea and visiting maybe the most amazing ancient city on earth.
Pure joy floating on the Dead Sea
Burning Man – I spent eight different years attending Burning Man, the most indescribable, amazing, fascinating and relaxing week you can imagine.
I believe in goal setting, even for relaxation and vacation. So on my recent vacation I set some very specific goals. Goal number one was to do as little as possible. Goal number two was to maximize my relaxation by getting multiple massages over the week. Goal number three was to avoid work in any way for the week.
Unfortunately, I failed slightly on goal number three. I ended up having to redo a piece of paperwork for a conference refund that was due during the week. There was also an rather serious complaint that I had to be looped in on so the president called to loop me in as well as get my opinion on a decision he’s making as well as inform me of a decision he made that impacted (in a positive way) one of my staff members. I didn’t mind him calling at all, he’s our interim president until the end of the month, I call him Yoda because he’s the wisest administrator I’ve ever worked with. So for him, vacation interruption is fully allowed. So I did fail on this goal, happily earlier in the week and I did what you need to do when you fail, forgave myself, vowed to do better and moved forward. And in that I was successful and didn’t do any work the rest of the week.
On goals one and two I was extremely successful, two nice ninety minute massages, a lot of blog writing for my new UFO site alienbluebook.com, lots of walks on the beach. Lots of sitting and simply watching waves and afternoon naps.
I wrapped up the week at home working on my little garden, I’ve got two new tomatoes coming in. I made some great food and did a little horse wagering on the Belmont Stakes and ended up winning about $1000. So, tonight I sit here more relaxed than I’ve been in quite some time. I give my return to work about two days to ruin it, but it’s necessary to take these breaks and I really needed this one.
So my friends, take those breaks, get that down time, it’s a way to make your health and happiness a priority. Do it, and have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
It’s been a hell of a year. Honestly this spring semester has been the hardest semester since that very first semester of the pandemic. I’ve spent some time thinking about why? The best I’ve come up with is that after two years of full on pandemic everything, people finally feel like the world should be back to normal again. Except that the normal we remember no longer exists and those who are trying to squeeze reality back into that space are trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. Now trust, if you swing a big enough hammer hard enough, you can make that work, but not with out a lot of noise, splinters and destruction. And honestly, noise, splinters and madness feels a lot like the last six months.
I am beyond tired and worn out mentally, ironically this comes as I have finally started to feel myself again since the beginning of the pandemic. This past semester at work I’ve had more HR issues, fired more people and had more issues than in a normal three year period at a job. It’s been absolutely nuts, and it feels like people have begun to take the trust I’ve put in them and burn me with it. Add to that, massive employee turnover above and below me on the responsibility ladder and it’s chaos.
So it’s time for a reset, and I’ve decided the best way to do that was to take a week someplace quiet. To do nothing but walk on the beach, swim in a pool, listen to waves, get some massage and to write. So that’s what I’m doing. The place that I’ve retreated to is a place I found when I was the most burned out I’ve ever been at work. When I first retreated to this hideout on the central coast twenty years ago, there was no cell service here, which heightened the ability to disconnect. Now, with WiFi and the ubiquitous nature of cell towers that is no longer the case. So instead, my phone is on do not disturb, all notifications are off, and no email shall be checked this week. Let the work world get along without me this week, I don’t need it encroaching on my peace.
So today I walked around, had a nice dinner and tonight I sleep with the windows open and the sounds of the waves to fall asleep to, my idea of peace. We all need these times, and they’re hard to come by, but they are also incredibly important. So find time to reset, find a special place to do it and you’ll have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Love cures people – both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. ~ Karl A Menninger
I’m someone who prefers to sleep warm in a cold room. Living in the Bay Area of California, on the San Mateo Peninsula wedged in between the Pacific coast and the San Francisco Bay a mile in each direction, cool nights are a given. so on my bed each night I have four blankets. The first is a basic store bought cotton blanket, the other three are much more special.
I have been blessed in my life to be surrounded by women who knit and crochet. As such, I’ve always had large numbers of homemade blankets at my disposal. The three pictured above are the ones the reside on my bed at night. The blue and white blanket was made by my mother years ago, the patterned blanket in the middle by someone who has been a student, a lover and an incredible friend, the white with diamond patterns on the left was made by my Granny.
These layers of love and warmth that I sleep under each night are constant reminders that I am/have been cared about. It takes hours and hours and hours to make a blanket like these and I appreciate the love imbued in each stitch. Sometimes the simplest things in life carry the most meaning.
So hang on to the simple demonstrations of love my friends, they’ll bring you happy days. ~ Rev Kane
It’s graduation season, working in education I’m seeing lots of photos on social media from friends and former colleagues posting graduation pictures. Without a doubt, graduation can be a significant life moment for many people and congratulations to all who are graduating this year. But for the moment I want to reflect on, I’m going to go back a bit further than graduation this year. In fact, I want to go all the way back to 1972 or 73.
My mother raised three kids as a single mom, I have tremendous respect for what that took. All three of us are college educated, decent people. Two of us working in education, one an entrepreneur and artist. She did all of this without a college education, or parents with money to support her. Normally as a kid, you really don’t know what’s happening, but I was both old enough and smart enough to understand more than most kids do. For this reason, my mother will never want for anything.
In the early seventies, after a bad divorce and a bit of a dead beat ex-husband being continually late on alimony and child support, my mother ended up unemployed. As you can imagine, this was utterly devastating for her and us. She did her best to conceal the financial realities at that time, this moment was the moment that the mask of childhood fell completely off for me.
We were having dinner, turkey Banquet Cooking Bags, poured over white bread. It’s funny how white bread back then was a luxury and now it’s wheat and multi-grain breads that hold that status. For those of you unfamiliar with cooking bags, these were single serving plastic bags with a couple pieces of processed meat and gravy that you could buy in the freezer section. You would take them out of the box and drop the plastic bags into a pot of boiling water. After they heated up, you plucked them out with tongs and usually burnt your fingers trying to cut them open to pour the contents over bread or rice.
I was excited that night to watch a TV show, Hogan’s Heroes if my memory serves me, and so I set up my tray table in the living room. I got my plate and when into the living room and being a little kid I did something stupid and flipped my plate to the ground. My dog of course pounced on his good fortune and scarfed up what was on the floor. I returned to the kitchen where my mom was eating and told her what happened and asked for more. Likely tired, stressed, and hungry my mom snapped at me, “there is no more.” Then she burst into angry and quickly much sadder tears. She then scraped half of hers onto my plate and I slunk away into the living room to eat my dinner. While this might not seem the most significant event, for me it was incredibly so.
I was at the right age to just be hitting the reality of the world face first. In that moment I came to face with a couple of realities. First, up to that point, because of the second thing I had thought, that our parents were omnipotent, I just assumed food was a guarantee, that only poor kids and staving kids in China didn’t have enough to eat. So now I was hit with the reality that my mother couldn’t solve every problem, she was just a regular person like I was and that I suddenly lived in a world where not having something to eat was a possibility. In that moment I had both become an adult mentally and a poor kid, a lot to handle all at the same time. I think it’s a bit rare that we remember the exact moment when we had to grow up, this was mine.
One of the bigger impacts this moment had on me is revealed by a joke that was often related about me when I was growing up, how I went from slims to huskies overnight. This is actually a reference to the sizing of Sears pants back in the 70’s. There were regular pants, slims for skinny kids and huskies for the fat kids. Up until the point of this happening I had been a stick thin kid, afterward, I put on a lot of weight. Basically, think of an 8 year-old with a beer belly. This all happened as a result of my awareness that food wasn’t a guarantee. I began hustling. Finding ways to make little bits of money here or there, folding pizza boxes for free slices, raking leaves, shoveling sidewalks in Winter. Hell, even gambling with my friends and yes, a little bit of theft thrown in for good measure. At times I even sweet talked my way at school into the lunch ladies giving up a chocolate milk or ice cream to me for free. And I was a kid, so it’s not like once I got money that I spent it on highly nutritious foods. I was buying donuts for breakfast, cookies, cupcakes, pizza, lots of soda, chocolate and candy. As such, I put on weight, it was an emotional reaction to the new realities of the life I was facing.
Crazy ripples click through our lives. Eating the type of foods I ate as a kid turned into the way I dealt with emotional turmoil, which also bled over to then using alcohol and drugs the same way. I’ve spent a lot of years trying to rewire my stress responses. Happily, drugs and alcohol no longer serve those purposes in my life, but food, well it still does. Those early coping mechanisms are the deepest and most ingrained and without a doubt have contributed to my diabetes as well.
We face so many of these type of moments as we go through life, at the time we are often wholly unaware of their seriousness or impact. We often don’t understand until we are unwinding our psyche through our personal work or with the help of a therapist years later. It’s why self-reflection, mindfulness and being present is so important in our lives. For us to be happy, to be content in our lives, it’s important that we pay attention to what’s happening each day, each moment in our lives, you never know when one of those moments will turn out to be incredibly significant and help us have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
That kindness is important is something I think that all of us can agree on. That at times it’s hard to be kind is something we all deal with in our lives. We’ve all had instances where we’re stressed, tired or distracted where we react in unkind ways. We feel bad at those times and that’s understandable, but what we all have to endeavor to do is not compound the error by letting it stand. It’s important when possible to go back and make it right. This is particularly important with children. Sure, you’re making dinner, someone’s calling on the phone, you have a headache and the munchkins have been bouncing off of the walls for hours. They’re tugging on your shirt to ask the same question they’ve asked a hundreds and you gruffly say something like, “not now!” but with a little too much force. They break down into tears and run off, now you feel awful, we’ve all been there. It’s that moment to take a deep breath, to turn down the burners on the stove, end the phone call and go hug your kid and tell them you love them. I was thinking about this because this week my young niece went to her first school dance.
When she came home I called her and we talked about the dance, how much fun she had, whether or not she danced with boys (she didn’t, safe so far), about the blisters on her feet from wearing high heels and dancing. But she also related this story and it pulled on my heart strings and got me thinking about how important kindness is, and how sometimes it’s really hard to find.
I think we all remember what it was like when we were tweens and teens, the desperate need to be accepted. The crushes we had back then often seemed like the most important thing to have happened in all of human history. As such, when things went well we floated on clouds, when they went wrong we wailed as if the world was ending. Anyone who is a parent of a tween or teen completely gets this and has my unending empathy, it’s a hard job. So, when in those vulnerable years you worked up the immensity of the courage to put yourself out there and ask another to accept you, it felt like a life and death endeavor. When you got rejected, devastating. So one of my niece’s friends worked up the courage to ask a boy to dance, probably the first time she’s ever done something like that, he said no. She broke down and called and asked to be picked up and taken home and got rejected again as her parents couldn’t come at that time. My niece and her friends consoled their friend.
This story broke my heart, we’ve all been there, even as adults we know the feeling of putting ourselves out there and being rejected. We never know who is facing something like in their lives. People are very good at wearing masks in front of others. So be kind, it’s important, never to the point of being unkind to yourself, but when you can, make the effort as it often has more impact than you can imagine. And it will certainly help others have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Research indicates that employees have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company. ~ Zig Ziglar
According to an article referencing a survey they had done, Forbes magazine lists the following as the top factors in employee happiness:
Appreciation for your work
Good relationships with colleagues
Good work-life balance
Good relationships with superiors
Company’s financial stability
Learning and career development
Job security
Attractive fixed salary
Interesting job content
Company values
For tonight’s post I really want to focus on the first item as it’s particularly relevant to me right now. Before that however, I want to draw attention to number 3, Work-Life Balance as this is something that I very often talk about and I do keynote talks at conferences and trainings about this very subject and it is something I’m very passionate about in my own life.
This past week I spent two days at the ECEPTS, Early Childhood Apprenticeship conference in Ontario, California. I was there to attend sessions, to do a panel presentation as well as meet with some folks from the Biden Administration. However the conference turned into much more, I happily made some connections with people whose names I’d often heard and had even been on email chains with about apprenticeship. Is was particularly nice to get to work with another dean who I have a lot in common with, as well as finally work in person with many of the ECEPTS team who I had only worked with via Zoom.
I was very proud of my team and our program, we got lots of positive recognition for the work we’ve been doing and my team and I were in demand for lots of side discussions and questions. Personally, the conference was very satisfying because I got a lot of positive attention and recognition for my role in the work we’re doing and for the development of non-traditional apprenticeships in early childhood education.
The attention went further than just compliments and kind words, in fact I was offered some consulting gigs, some partnership opportunities for our college, as well as a straight up job offer. So the appreciation felt truly sincere. And this lead me to really think about job satisfaction and recognition.
Both the Zig Ziglar quote and Forbes magazine survey results above reference the importance of recognition for doing good work on the job. In higher education where I work, unfortunately as a manager, I don’t have the authority to give that recognition in the form of financial compensation. So as a manager I have to be creative about showing people how much I appreciate what they do. Simple compliments are more powerful than you might think, emails and most powerful hand written notes of appreciation work well. But there are other ways as well, giving someone professional development opportunities, being more than flexible for people doing a good job and even taking opportunities to make sure others on campus know how good of a job they are doing. I’m also very fond of giving people cupcakes and the occasional bottle of wine. And as hard as this can be, it’s critical as a manager to find ways to make sure people know they are appreciated.
This is why this past week felt so great for me. But it also was a pretty strong reminder of what I don’t get from my current job. It’s unfortunate for any employee to find out that they are more appreciated, regionally and even nationally, than they are on their own campus. Typically, for me, this is the type of revelation that really tells me it’s time to move on from my current position. The message tonight my friends is simple, if you’re not getting what you need from any job or any type of relationship, it’s time to take care of yourself. Do the analysis of whether or not it’s better to stay or move on, there are always costs for both. But at the end of that analysis, if you’ll be happier and better off moving on, as hard as that may be, be good to yourself and move on. The goal for all of us is always, happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane.
The Ministry of Happiness 