It feels a little bit like the world has gone mad. At almost any point in life, we all know someone going through some struggles. Right now, frankly, it feels like I don’t know anyone not going through some kind of struggle. I have good friends going through custody battles, another dealing with a parent going into hospice, another recovering from a stroke. Even one of my nieces just had an incident of cyber bulling.
At work, it isn’t any better. I’m dealing with a couple of instructor issues that have students up in arms. I have instructors lying to me, unfortunately people are showing their true colors and too often that color is black. It doesn’t help that I’m not feeling incredibly supported by the people in the system who have that responsibility. It feels right now like everyone is putting me on an island and then driving the boats away.
I’m not alone in this, right now some of my best people are really struggling. As one of my people said recently, I’m in my thirties and had heart palpitations last night, it’s not supposed to be like that. And they’re right, it shouldn’t be that way. Work shouldn’t be such a struggle that it damages your health. But in fact, that’s exactly what it is for many of us. For me, I had dreams of retiring from my job this year, that is not going to happen. Not that I can truly retire until 65, you see I have a couple of heart conditions that make me uninsurable outside of work or medicare and medicare doesn’t start til 65. So I’ll have to continue working after I retire from my current system. However, I won’t need to make a lot of money, and I will be able to work a job where I don’t have the responsibility, madness and stress of managing sixty plus people like I do now. Not to mention the ten programs and two centers and all the associated students, budgets, legal issues and politics. So I’m on the clock, 52 months and a week.
So what do we do to preserve or physical and mental health? My suggestion, take a breath, be kind, give grace.
First, take a breath. I know, it seems like ridiculously simplistic advice, I assure you that it is not. And I mean this literally, take a deep breath, even better, spend a few minutes just breathing. There is a really simple breathing technique I really like:
Find a comfortable position with your back straight to allow optimum oxygen absorption into your lungs. If acceptable, close your eyes.
(5) Count to five and breathe-in through your nose.
(2) Hold this breath at its peak for two seconds.
(7) Slowly release the air in your lungs for seven seconds by making a small “o” with your mouth.
~Repeat~
~Repeat~
Post-awareness: How do you feel now? What’s different? Notice the various parts of your body that feel recharged, heightened, more relaxed, etc.
And take a breath has a bigger meaning, it also means take care of yourself. Taking some breathing breaks each day is great, but if there are bigger things you need to do, find the time to do them. For me, it’s time by the ocean and travel. So I’ve started planning a trip to Mardi Gras in February and today I took a drive down highway 1.
Second, be kind. It’s a really funny thing but when you’re not feeling great, when the world feels like a horribly unsafe and unkind place, being kind to others make you feel better. This can be something big and organized like volunteering at a homeless shelter or even rounding up donations for the shelter of your choice. But honestly, it can just be the small things. It could be as simple as being kind to strangers, letting someone go ahead of you in a line, paying for the coffee of the person in behind you in line, giving someone a hug or smile, or just taking a few minutes to help someone with something they need help with. Somehow, small acts of kindness also help you feel better as well, kind of a two for one.
Finally, give grace and this is the hardest part. When we’re stressed we lose our emotional reserves. That thing that allows us to take some hits without reacting. it’s hard to give people that space. But if we can find a way to do that, in the end, like kindness, it will pay dividends and we’ll feel better later. One note, this is where and when it makes sense, not when people are being consciously inconsiderate or mean. Giving kindness and grace should never be given if you’re being taken advantage of, this is about being a good person, not becoming a door mat.
So my friends, do your best to take care of yourselves, breath, be kind and give grace and we’ll all have happier day my friends. ~ Rev Kane
We’re living in the golden age of selfishness and entitlement. There is a lot of debate about why this is, but frankly I don’t care how it has come to be. What I’m interested in, is what do we do about it? As adults, we all have to take responsibility for our current actions.
You see this everywhere, people who walk up in front of lines at the supermarket and then if someone says something, they feign not noticing the line. The place you see it most however is on the road. The person who tailgates you even though you’re driving over the speed limit. The massive amount of people looking at their phones while driving who don’t know the light has changed, are suddenly driving super slow or my personal favorite, the people who stop in traffic to look at their GPS and figure out if they’ve missed their turn. I’ve not just seen this on city streets, but even on two lane state highways, on a turn as a bonus.
People in apartments don’t care about the impact of their TV’s or stereos have on their neighbors. People will arrive home at night with music blaring out of their cars no matter what time it is. And don’t get me started on people who purposely put tailpipe amplifiers on crappy little cars so their exhaust noise is super loud. We see it at the gym, the people who never wipe down machines, never put their weights back or wear enough cologne or perfume that any one within ten feet is choking on their scent.
I see it at work, I have faculty I supervise who make requests that are completely about them to the detriment of the students. Typically the same faculty who are always screaming, students first, at the administration. And here is a great example, faculty have access to a copier in our workroom. We ordered a lot of paper and so the garbage can was sitting on top of some paper boxes. Someone moved the can, took out paper and left two reams vertical so they were standing above the box rim. They put the lid on which of course didn’t fit it was at an angle, then they replaced the can. Setting up a situation where someone would toss in some garbage and it would slide off and spill the garbage. But they didn’t care, they couldn’t be bothered to take one second to correct things and besides, someone else would have to pickup the garbage. (cue Alice’s Restaurant)
Selfishness and entitlement makes life worse for everyone. It increases people’s frustration and anger and that can lead to issues like the violence associated with road rage. It doesn’t take much to turn this around, because truly it’s the small things and comes down to one simple question. How will my decision or current action impact others? If it could impact others negatively than mitigate or change your decision or action.
Lot’s of little things can help as well. You don’t always need to be the first to go if two of you arrive at the same time, smile and wave at people to show them you know they are there. Be apologetic if you make a mistake and do something inconsiderate. These simple acts could make for happier days for all of us my friend. ~ Rev Kane
Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. ~ Benjamin Franklin
I think all of us, as we age, start asking some of the same questions. What impact have I made in my life, do I have any regrets, and we start to question the meaning of our time here on Earth. I’ve been really in this head space the last couple of years, along with the related questions related to what I’m passionate about.
The pandemic put a lot of life on pause for a lot of us. But that pause gave us all time to think and consider our lives. Including a lot of people who have never stopped and thought about what they were doing in life. This has led to what the media has called the great resignation, the fact that a lot of people after considering their lives decided to change career paths.
Many of us are like logs in a river, just floating along and going where life takes us. But I’ve always thought I needed to steer some. But steer toward what? That’s where meaning in life comes in, because it’s that meaning that determines where you steer yourself in the river of life and guides you as to what you will do.
At times I have to admit that in this respect I have felt like a failure. I’ve always been a person who’s interested in everything, so there is no single overriding thing that is the focus or meaning in my life. Recently, I’ve realized that there is another way to look at this. You see I’ve fallen prey to the American script in this respect. You see in America there always has to be a gold medal, an award, a big finish if you will. But is that really how things have to be?
Recently I saw a post on social media that talked about meaning in life, meaning with a small “m” they called it. It was a short post but an incredibly eye opening one for me. Meaning doesn’t have to be some large thing you accomplish, every pyramid is made up a huge number of blocks. In your life, meaning can be the accumulation of those blocks.
So the homeless student I worked with Friday to help get them a hotel voucher in order to make getting through a medical procedure more easily is a block. Helping people I supervise realize their goals and get into better positions is a block. All of the small meaningful acts of support and kindness that we do for others are part of that meaning, the blocks that make up the meaningful pyramid of in our life. I really appreciated this perspective and it’s frankly made me feel a bit better about my own journey and I hope it does the same for you my friends. ~ Rev Kane
There’s a huge emotional component to weight loss. ~ Carnie Wilson
This week my post was inspired by a lovely human I work with who also happens to be a regular reader of this blog. We were having a conversation about weight loss and I realized there are some things that were worth saying on the subject in relation to happiness. First a tiny rant.
Have you ever noticed that the people who most often give weight loss advice are usually really skinny. It reminds me of these drop dead gorgeous actresses and models who do those no make-up photo shoots in order to show everyone’s natural beauty. They always look good, of course they do, they became famous based their natural beauty, so yes, with makeup they are these flawless beauties. And without makeup, they’re just incredibly gorgeous, so brave of them.
It’s the same attitude when I hear skinny people who say things like, “nothing tastes better than skinny.” First off darlin, have you ever had a cupcake, a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie a slice of real NY pizza? These are the people who can relate, because you know, they once put on 6 pounds over Christmas break and went up to a massive 138 pounds. I mean hell, I can put 6 pounds on at dinner and I haven’t seen 138 since junior high, but yeah, solidarity sister.
Being overweight is unhealthy, we all know this but losing weight is hard. Particularly for someone like me, due to my blood sugar issues, there’s one pathway foodwise and that’s of course a low carb diet. Unfortunately very low carb, the fact is for me to lose weight and get my blood sugar in line, I have to consume less than 60 overall carbs per day and need to get that as close to 20 net carbs per day as possible. This is life with a pathetic pancreas. Of course I’m an Italian-Irish kid from NY who loves Asian food, so life without bread, pasta, potatoes, pizza and rice, well that’s really tough for me. Especially given that nutritionist will tell you to reward yourself for making the right decision. At this point in my life I’ve given up drinking, drugs and womanizing, so I’m left with gambling or eating as a reward system. Gambling is not the best choice and eating is the problem so it makes things tough, but not impossible and I’ve had some success. In 2002 I weighed 250 pounds, which is 65 pounds more than I do today. Sure 65 pounds and twenty years isn’t a massive pace, but it’s consistent progress in the right direction.
Of course we all know that weight loss is most effective when you eat appropriate types and sized meals mixed with regular exercise. Sounds so simple, but like many things it’s the practice that’s hard. And there are things that get in the way, for a lot of us those things are lack of sleep and stress. Lack of sleep does a number of things to your body. First it makes you tired (duh) but being tired makes it easier to be lazy and not exercise that day or order some takeout that’s less healthy than what you would have made for dinner yourself. For emotional eaters like me, lack of sleep reduces your emotional reserves and so a stressful day makes it far more likely that you’ll turn to food for a dopamine burst, and those foods are likely to be high in sugar, fat, salt and calories the things that make us feel good. Lack of sleep also reduces the effectiveness of your body in preventing Cortisol spikes, so to oversimplify it, lower sleep, higher levels of Cortisol, more stress leads to a vicious cycle of you eating to make you feel better. Then of course, after you’ve spent a night eating badly you beat yourself up, which impacts your sleep, adds to your stress and so you exercise less and eat more, vicious.
I’d love to tell you I have a magic bullet for getting out of this cycle, but all I’ve got is pure will and determination. At some point you have to force yourself out of the cycle. And this is where the microhabits I talked about in a previous post can help. It’s not a reasonable expectation that you’ll suddenly start eating perfectly and exercising the full amount you need to. But we often try exactly that then crash and burn and the failure pushes us right back into the cycle. So do yourself a favor and work yourself into gradually keeping in mind the goal is to do a bit better today or this week than you do the next. And most importantly to be consistent about what you’re doing. That’s the best advice I’ve got, anyone selling you easy weight loss is almost certainly lying to you my friends.
There is a question of philosophy that comes up, being less healthy will certainly shorten your life. But if the only way to extend your life is to be miserable all of the time, is it worth it? Most people, citing getting to see their grandkids grow up or other important future milestones, would say yes. But I think, as with all things in life, you need to do a cost-benefit analysis. Years versus misery, and where I typically come out on this analysis is the following. As with many things the middle of the road feels like the right path. to do enough so that you extend your life a bit, while being able to enjoy the time you have. So yes, eat right, exercise at a level you can handle and when you’re at that birthday party have a piece of cake. When you’re on vacation for a week, eat dessert, have that pasta dish and then come back to what you should do and be consistent again after. It’s the formula I use and it seems to strike a good balance between doing what I should, with what I want, and helping me have happy days my friends. Maybe it will work for you too. ~ Rev Kane
So I turn to talking about sleep tonight because last night I hardly got any. Apartment complexes with thin walls sometimes make it really tough to sleep, particularly when your neighbor doesn’t understand the simple physics of how bass notes penetrate walls. Of course he may have figured it out a bit when the bass vibrations of my fists pounding on the wall at 2:30AM penetrated his space.
It’s pretty amazing the range of health benefits that the medical world attribute to sleep, including helping regulate your weight and blood sugar. I think we’re all well aware of the mental health benefits of sleep. All you have to do is observe a new parent and you’ll see pretty quickly what sleep deprivation does to humans. They have a tendency to be cranky, mentally unfocused and distracted people. When you consistently don’t get enough sleep those are the same types of things that happen to you.
According to the CDC, something like 70 million Americans suffer from sleep issues and I think we all know how often we don’t get enough sleep. A recent study showed that sufficient sleep was the single most important factor in your daily mood. And caffeine is no substitute for good sleep.
The tips for getting good sleep are pretty consistent across multiple sources and focus on several things including having a consistent sleep schedule, avoiding devices shortly before bed, keeping your home in low light before bed, not using your bed for anything but sleep (and sleep related activities) and avoiding big meals and caffeine shortly before bed. Finally, regular exercise, like it does for so many things, helps you get good sleep.
So take care of your sleep my friends and you’ll have happier days. ~ Rev Kane
Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. ~ Langston Hughes
I love the rain, I love almost everything about it. I love laying in bed and listening to the rain pounding on the roof. I love the feel of the blast of cold air that precedes a downpour at the front end of a thunderstorm. I love watching lightening crack across the sky and the way thunder rumbles my entire being. As a child living in the Northeast, we had a large picture window with a small shelf that ran along the window. I would climb up on that shelf and sit in the window to watch the thunderstorms across the valley. One of the best smells in the world is the smell of fresh earth after the rain.
I’ve been fortunate to have lived and traveled all over the world. As such I’ve experienced so many different kinds of rain. There are the regular thunderstorms that open up every afternoon with regularity in hot and humid Florida summers. There’s the summer thunderstorms that build up in the Northeastern summers after days of heat and humidity, creating giant anvil clouds that climb into the sky. Then, that downdraft of hard cold wind that rips across the land, right before the clouds unleash their fury and drown the world. There is rain in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil that feels like a hot shower and rain in that same forest that you can hear, but gets captured by the canopy and never even touches you. There is the rain after the rain when you’re hiking on a trail. You’ve hidden away from the big rain and after you finally come out to hike again you’re walking along and the wind blows and the rain in the trees suddenly comes crashing down on you out of nowhere, it’s always a surprise blast of chilly water.
When I lived in the Mojave Desert, rain was a blessing, it always came too fast, too hard and never lasted long enough. But rain in the desert brings gifts and I was fortunate to live there one year when the rain came at the right time, and the right amount and the result was a super bloom of flowers.
The only rain I don’t like is the constant cold rain for days that happens in the Western winter or the Eastern spring. I never liked it but then during my first two weeks thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail I got rained on like ten of the first fourteen days. It left me cold and constantly wet, and truly demoralized me. Until the injury that ended my hike, that rain was the only thing that almost truly drove me off of the trail.
Rain hit the Bay Area today, our first real rain of the year and I was excited to go out for my daily walk while the bands of light rain from the storm filtered through, it was wonderful. I have many great memories of being in the rain, one of my best dates involved getting caught in a downpour with only her dog’s car towel for an umbrella. So here’s to the rain and the happiness it brought me today. ~ Rev Kane
We all hope for rebirth breakthrough moments ~ Dane Cook
My three week birthday celebration is in it’s final week as I’m hanging out in Reno. Why Reno? Well, it’s a 4 hour drive from home and I came into town on the Tuesday after Labor Day. I’ve spent a lot of Tuesdays after Labor Days in this town, typically transitioning back to the default world after Burning Man. So as expected I’ve seen a lot of dusty cars coming back from the burn, and have run into a fair number of burners here since I’ve been in town and that makes me happy.
Over the last three weeks, I’ve had some fun, done a bit of gambling, ate some good food. Here in Reno it’s been just laid back time, I’ve got a massage scheduled for tomorrow and the NFL starts tomorrow night. Then back down the hill, a stop in Roseville for good pizza and great cupcakes before I head back to the Bay and hopefully much cooler temperatures.
Driving up here I rolled through a Sacramento record high temperature of 116 and even 117 in Roseville/Rocklin area. Walking around on one stop and being out of the car at 114 in Dixon brought back memories of living in the Mojave Desert for a few years.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts the last year or so I’ve been languishing and really haven’t quite been back to being myself. That happily has changed over the last month or so. It’s taken months of doing all of the things I know I need to do to lift my mood to get there. Unfortunately, what seems to have helped is for lots of tragedy and shit to go wrong in my life. This is an incredibly sad thought, but for me, chaos and tragedy is what feels completely normal to me and I think, helped me come back to normal. We all get wired during our lifetime by how our life happens and how we are taught to operate. For some people, being a doormat becomes normal, for others being aggressive and angry, for me it’s having to solve problems and deal with tragedy. The important thing for all of us is to recognize our wiring and how it impacts our lives. Then if necessary, compensate or if need be, work with someone to get yourself rewired.
Over the last few months there has been a lot of death and illness in the orbit of my life. Nothing I’m personally suffering from physically, but people close to me have become ill and/or died. Too many in too short of a time period, I’ve also had some heavy thinking I needed to do surrounding my retirement decisions and in fact have decided to remain in California and in my current job longer than I had originally planned. This also precipitates some changes in the way I live my life and my future plans. But over the last few weeks, I’ve dealt with what needs to be dealt with, made the decisions I’ve needed to make, and I’m feeling much better.
This doesn’t mean things are perfect, but I’m happier and working on the next things that need to be dealt with, some financial and others. For the first time since the pandemic, I’m really feeling like life has restarted and I’m moving forward again, happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
Happiness is not a goal, it’s a by product. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
A lot of the research around happiness boils happiness down to these three things pleasure, meaning and engagement. So for something to make you happy it first needs to be pleasurable. It needs to be something that you find meaning in, and finally that what you do matters.
On my birthday one of my sisters posted the picture above, it’s a picture from six or seven years ago with both of my sister’s children. It was the first time I’d ever gotten them all together at once for a picture. My sister posted it with a comment that if you knew the story, you knew why this picture would be important to me.
It’s not a complicated story, but it is a story of happiness. I have always loved children, children are so amazing, they’re free flowing and open to madness and magic and kid logic is my all time favorite thing. Kid logic is when a munchkin strings together several accurate logical ideas to come to an absolutely insane conclusion. So for instance, if you tell a kid that drinking milk will make you bigger, they may look at you and tell you to stop drinking milk because you’re already too big. Of course they may mean too old, or they may mean too fat. 🙂
One of the best parts of my job is the time I get to spend interacting with the munchkins at our campus child development center. The other day a burnt lunch set off the fire alarm, when I showed up in the toddler room they surrounded me and all told me the story of the fire alarm all at once, it was hilarious and delightful.
The story of the picture above is simple happy story. I’ve never had children of my own. I often joke that I always wanted kids, just wasn’t keen on the wife and marriage idea. But that never came to be for me. One of the most important people in my early life, who I may or may not be named after depending on which day you ask my mother, was my Uncle Mikey. Technically my cousin, Uncle Mike also didn’t have kids and loved them He was the relative who had the cabin with the big pool and so we all spent a lot of time swimming and hanging out at Uncle Mike’s in the summer. In many ways my life has paralleled his. So my role as Uncle Mike is incredibly important to me and brings me great happiness.
Hanging with, talking to, buying presents for and looking out for my nieces and nephews is pleasurable to me. Being someone who is a resource and a guide to them is really meaningful to me and finally, it matters. We all needed, when we were growing up, someone other than our parents we could go to when we needed advice or help. My oldest nephew is about to go to college, he leaves next week and this week I got a thank you note from him for his graduation present, which included a bit of a life lesson lecture. The last phrase in the note was, I won’t let you down, what we do for our nieces and nephews matters.
I hope my friends, that you have things in your life that are pleasurable, have meaning and matter to you. ~ Rev Kane
If you’re not getting older, you’re dead. ~ Tom Petty
So I hope you’ll forgive me tonight, this is a somewhat indulgent bit of of writing, with no real attempt to connect it to happiness other than maybe the phrase, happy to birthday to me.
It’s my birthday, and I always get a little reflective around this time of year, I think that’s pretty common. I like my birthday, granted if I’m being honest, I have hadn’t had a lot of great birthdays. But your birthday is the only holiday, that is yours alone, unless you’re a twin. A few stick out, one I particularly enjoyed was my 21st birthday when I saw Power Station in concert, great night, good friends, good show. Of course 40 was a big one, I set up a full year of celebrations and celebrated my actual birthday in Reno and the whole next week at my first Burning Man.
I think most of us move through multiple lives, I’m not talking reincarnation here, maybe the more accurate phrasing would life phases, but I prefer to think of them as separate lives.
My first life is the one I least remember, it’s that way for everyone I’m sure. While I have incredibly early memories, I have memories as early as two years old, I don’t remember a whole lot of detail until kindergarten. My first life ended when I was seven years old. In 1971, I became one of the first kids in my elementary school to have divorced parents, in fact, the only other person that I was aware of that did, was my friend Aaron Harris. We would form a bond that has lasted deep into adulthood.
My second life lasted until I left home at 18. It was a roller coaster life, full of magic and mayhem. I had amazing and fun experiences as a child. But I grew up in a tough place, at a tough time and along with the fun I had as a child, there was also a lot of tragedy, trauma. and responsibility. There were some incredible highs, winning Babe Ruth League championships, my first girlfriend, and secret civil engineering work. The lows were deep, violence at home, violence in the street, friends committing suicide and the deepest point, my own suicide attempt. But that life ended the day I walked into my dorm room at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
An interesting side note, RIT is not located in Rochester, in fact it’s located in South Henrietta, so in fact the acronym should technically be SHIT. A fact not missed by students at the college who frequently print up t-shirts highlighting this fact, downside for the administration of being a college with a printing program. Nothing in any of my lives has ever proceeded in a straight line, so going to college was no exception. I had good grades and decided to become an electrical engineering major by participating in a deeply scientific career exploration process. I met with George Esposito, my high school counselor and former little league coach, who said to me, you’re good in math and science, your dad works for the power company, how about electrical engineering? Sure, why not, and just like that I had a college major.
I had an inkling that it wasn’t really what I wanted to do, and in the process of applying to college I found a bit of a loophole. You see RIT offered a 2+2 transfer program, the way this program worked, was that you spent your first two-years at Eisenhower College, just east of Rochester on the shores of Cayuga Lake. Eisenhower College was a small liberal arts school that had been acquired by RIT in 1979. This was a great plan, I could do my general education work at Eisenhower and then transfer to RIT. Then in the summer before school, the doorbell rang, I answered the door and a man said, “telegram for Michael Kane.” That’s right, an actual damn telegram like something out of a classic fifties movie. The telegram informed me that Eisenhower College had been closed and I would be transferred to RIT. This is one of those nexus points in my life, I often wonder what would have happened if I had gotten the chance to attend Eisenhower. I think I might have made the choice to move on from engineering to education, biology or social science, something I actually had an interest in studying. But it didn’t work out that way.
I have a full sensory memory of the first moment of my third life. It occurred after my parents and I dropped everything in my first dorm room and I shewed them away. My third life started as I walked back into that first floor dorm room, embedded in the Sigma Pi Fraternity dorm at RIT. I remember seeing the three beds, realizing I was in a triple, the campus was now overcrowded due to the Eisenhower’s closing. I had arrived first, so I took the single bed, foregoing the bunk beds. I set my boombox on the dresser by the bed and found a radio station. I can still smell that recently cleaned dorm room odor, I would be reminded of it many times as a resident assistant each fall as we re-entered the dorms. Joe Jackson’s Stepping Out was playing on the radio station. The first piano chords of that song always take me right back to that room, the smell, the sights, the absolute feeling of trepidation and excitement, that moment, the beginning of my third life was the very definition of freedom in every sense.
But to quote Kris Kristofferson, although most of you probably think Janis Joplin wrote Me and Bobby McGee, “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” And that really summed up my reality at that point and my third life was short lived. But damn it was fun. I’m not supposed to say this sort of thing, becoming an addict and a drunk, being drunk and stoned for two years is supposed to always be related as a cautionary tale about how terrible substance abuse is on your life. And while in fact, it did get to that place, the trip was fucking fantastic. I was free of home, of the psychological abuse I’d lived with, the rules, the bullshit, the inbred, ingrown mentality of the city I came from. I was loaded all of the time, having fun, breaking boundaries, expanding my mind. I did a lot of LSD during those two years and it was great. I learned the importance of confidence in being able to get close to and intimate with the so called fairer sex. I was living the perfect party boy life of a college student, the holy cliche of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Perhaps the highlight of the rock and roll was when my girlfriend Maryanne, left me with tickets for a show on campus. She was into new wave music so I didn’t plan on going, I hadn’t heard of the band. My friend Mark and I were getting loaded and nobody seemed to be around, I remembered the tickets and so we grabbed them and walked over to the ice arena. It wasn’t very crowded, most people were sitting down and we walked right up to the front of the stage. The lights dimmed, the fog machines kicked in full blast then the red spotlights turned the fog red as U2 kicked into Sunday Bloody Sunday. We became instant fans, that album was constantly playing in our fraternity house for the rest of the year.
My third life ended in March of 1984 in the office of Dean Kenyon. You see I’d failed out of RIT and was petitioning to be readmitted, they frowned on 0.24 GPAs. I had been trying to get re-admitted through the Phoenix Program but my math level was higher than the person who tested people, so that didn’t work. And Dean Kenyon ended my third life with one of the most caring and honest conversations I’ve ever had. After reviewing my files Dean Kenyon looked at me and said, “I see the issue, you’re a fuck up.” I was in absolute shock that he’d said this to me. He continued on by telling me that I was obviously quite intelligent and capable, but I just didn’t care enough about myself or school. He made me an offer, he’d readmit me immediately, but if I ever had a quarter below 2.00, I was out, permanently, no appeal. He reminded me that even the best engineering students had a bad semester from time to time and ended up below 2.00. He then told me that the other option was to go home, take some time and get my shit together and if I wanted to return, to call him an he’d readmit me with no conditions.
This was one of the most impactful conversations I’ve ever had. He was completely right and my life completely fell apart, I spun out, hit rock bottom and then proceeded as Dean Kenyon had suggested, to get my shit together, thus starting my fourth life.
My fourth life was, as the others had been, a rocky road and it was my longest life lasting over twenty years. The one consistency was that the trajectory continually pointed up. It started by getting back to college, getting into the right major. I did a lot of exploration and completed several degrees. I spent time in Brazil, worked in international development, found my way to California twice and met, fell for, got devoured and destroyed by and survived the love of my life. Throughout this period I suffered from depression and found ways to deal with it until the point that I rarely suffer from serious depression anymore.
My fifth life started in the fortieth year of my chronological life. I transitioned from being a student to a full-time professional. It was the year of my first burning man. It ignited the lifestyle I developed where I would quit my job and travel every few years. It has become the life that has been the least bumpy, where I’ve become the most comfortable with myself, meaning I’ve also told a lot of people to go to hell and let them leave my life. It also has become my most financially stable life. My fifth life is ending, there isn’t an exact date but soon my sixth life will be underway. It will take place on the east coast, and will hopefully be a centered around family, friends and nature with far more writing, painting and guitar playing.
Just a little reminiscing tonight, happy birthday to me.
So this week two things lined up to inspire this post tonight. The first resulted from an issue at work that gets under my skin every time. So I posted this bit of life advice online:
Don’t be the type of employee who follow the rules or does your job only when the boss is looking over your shoulder. Be better than that.
The second was seeing the image below on Twitter, but similar posts fly around on Facebook as well.
My favorite bit of advice, for obvious reasons is Don’t pick a fight with an old man, if he’s too old to fight, he might just kill you. I think I have a new poster for my office.
There’s a book on my list of books to write, that list is unfortunately long and I need to get in gear and get them written. The book is a book of life advice to leave behind for my nieces and nephews. I think the list above would be a lovely place to start.
As the image states, a lot of this all just comes down to common sense. The fact is we all know how to be good employees, we all know it’s wrong to screw off when the boss isn’t around and only work when they are present. The true quality of every person is how they act when no one else is watching. If someone drops their wallet in front of you and walks away, your quality is determined by the choice you make at that moment. We all know the right thing to do is pick up the wallet and chase after the person to give it back to them. But if no one else is watching do you do that, or do you pocket the wallet and later pull out the cash and throw it out? We all encounter these type of situations regularly and over your life you develop a pattern of choices. These choices determine at the end of the day whether or not you’re a good person or not.
So what does this have to do with happiness? One thing I’ve learned over the years is that living a happy life is very much the same things as being a good person. In every situation, with every new day, we encounter new situations that give us a chance to be happy or not. How can I say that? Well, what matters in many situations is not what happens to us, as much as how we chose to deal with the situation. It can be as simple as choosing not to lose your cool when you get cut off in traffic, or when your toddler wipes out their bowl of cereal all over the floor. Now we have no choice with the truly catastrophic things that happen to us, at those times we need to grieve and heal. However a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime of making the happier choices leads to a life of happiness. We talked about micro habits recently, and this is another opportunity to employ that strategy, start with just making one conscious happy choice each morning when you wake up. Each day decide to start with a small positive affirmation when first looking in the mirror. Tell yourself, this will be a happy day. It’s a small choice, a few seconds of thought, but doing it consistently can help you have happier days. ~ Rev Kane
The Ministry of Happiness 