(Almost) Headed Home

Our Christmas stay with our grandkids is over (sigh) and we are (Almost) Headed Home. Almost because our flight from Salt Lake City is delayed over two hours. It has been snowing here on and off for two days and, on the way to the airport the car next to us went into a 720-spin on the slick road and almost hit us. But the snow here isn’t the reason for our delay. Lightning storms in Texas delayed the plane’s departure from Austin to Salt Lake. You should know that in spite of the fact that I am a Million Mile flyer … and that I find the window seat at 30,000 feet a great place to work or write … I hate airports, especially on busy flight days.   OK. If I had an airport to myself … and maybe a few hand-selected friends … it might be tolerable.  I’m just not fond of being crammed into uncomfortable seating at the gates with hundreds of travelers. Businessmen talking (loudly so we’ll all know how important they are), closing deals on their cell phones. Noisy kids and noisy parents trying in vain to keep them under control. Lonely souls telling their life stories to anyone who will listen.  The inevitable babbler with the annoying voice who can’t seem to stop talking even though she ran out of things to say ten years ago.

Knowing

Most mornings, I write two pages of stream of consciousness prose in a notebook, a habit I picked up from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.   She recommends three pages because of what she calls third page revelations that often turn up in the third page.  Three pages can be a grind at this point in my life so I start out with two and go on if I feel like it.  Sometimes, revelations show up early, in page one or page two.  Like today, halfway down page two:

Think about it.

 

Happy Now

I am sitting at the kitchen table in my daughter’s house in Herriman, UT.   Through the window in front of me, I can see an early spring snow flurry lightly coating the back lawn with white.  My daughter just got home from work, stylish and beautiful (much more so that she believes, but isn’t that true of many of us?).   I’ve been sitting here, writing and emailing friends for a couple of hours.  I am at peace.  I am happy.  It is all too rarely that I stop to acknowledge that kind of happiness, simply being in a place I want to be, doing what I enjoy doing.  Too often, I want the Capital H Happy.   You know.   Everything is going well, the future looks bright and, by the way, any unhappiness from the past is resolved, forgiven or forgotten.

Being Happy

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be

Last night, the topic of our Thursday Night Men’s Meeting was slogans.   Twelve-step programs are big on slogans and there is a reason.   In a crisis, wisdom is easier to recall in a bumper-sticker sized bit than some sentence-long or page-long chunk.  As someone who’s always hated bumper stickers, I accept that particular bit of wisdom reluctantly and, by the way, usually cringe when the topic is announced.  When the topic is slogans, inevitably someone brings up the one at the top of the page, usually attributed to President Lincoln.  Last night, I beat them to the punch and brought it up myself, and in keeping with my contrarian, curmudgeonly nature, I dissected it.

Being Happy

Do you know anyone who doesn’t seem to know how to be happy?  You look at their lives and you see how many good things have been put on their plate, yet they’re always waiting for the next thing, the next day, the change that will make it good.  I know people like that.  I also am fortunate to know people who have very little, yet still seem to be happy human beings.  I feel privileged to have them as friends.  Me?  I have been a most fortunate man.  My lower middle class parents worked hard to provide me with an education that in turn gave me a career that not only paid the bills and provided a reasonable retirement but gave me work I enjoyed.  I married my college sweetheart and we’re still ticking along together 44 years later.   We had two beautiful children and now luxuriate in three wonderful grandkids.  And yet … being happy can still take effort.  As in every life, everything isn’t perfect.  People, places and things aren’t all exactly where or what I’d have them be.  While we are comfortable financially now, we worry about the road ahead, so I continue to work … sometimes I enjoy it but more often these days, it wears me out.  Age brings aches, senior maladies and worries about what’s to come.  But most days, I can say I’m a happy man.

Why Blog?

Of course, the inspiration for this post goes to this Direct TV commercial which is absolutely hysterical.