I sat down this morning irritable. Last night I decided that in an effort to read a little more, I’d start at 7:30 versus say 8:30. 8:30 reading is a laughable endeavor. I read two pages and start falling asleep.  Turns out 7:30 reading is the same. I just got in seven more pages before crashing. The difference? 8:30 me sometimes sleeps until 4:30 a.m. 7:30 me takes what turns out to be a 30 min nap and stays up until 10:30, then falls back asleep and wakes up irritable the next day. This is a lot of numbers for one paragraph. 

Irritable me lands on a negative slant to write about or doesn’t want to at all, but we all control our attitude and I tell people to do so all the time, so what’s good for the goose...

I have resided in Baton Rouge, LA for the last 32 years, longer than everywhere else combined. I married a girl born and raised here and we have  mostly raised two kids. I have two businesses with my best friends and have carved out a little niche for myself that I can jump off from to most anywhere in the country and perhaps (I haven’t looked extensively), the world. It’s pretty affordable, not really super safe, but it’s where I am and I’m likely not going anywhere, except maybe one day east, to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  This long recap is here to ask one thing. If I am here, and I have what most would deem a great and successful life here, why am I constantly looking to get out of here?  

I am, and justifiably so, extremely hard on this place.  There are a lot of things that I don’t think are great, but they are only not great because maybe I want to do different things and it’s strengths don’t interest me, but that’s just it. All cities suck to a portion of its citizenry. Sure Chattanooga has great outdoor stuff to do but if I were there I’d find something wrong with it too.

Turns out, I don’t think I want to escape Baton Rouge. I want to escape me. 

There are of course exceptions to most things, but over my life so far, I am observing that left alone, we skew negative. This isn’t going to be annotated and taught in psychology books, shoehorned between Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Freudian  Ego Theory because, well it’s just an observation on the realities of my surroundings. No matter how good most of us have it, it’s never good enough or there’s still something missing. I’ll argue it has nothing to do with where we are. It’s 100% inside. This isn’t a newsflash. 

Maybe the world isn’t like me though. Maybe by and large you are content, maybe I’m the lone misanthrope, but I don’t think so. If I was, you’d probably not nod your head along with the imaginary beat with me, humming along in the background, the sometimes miserable background music to our lives, Nickelback for the soul.  

“But you said in the first paragraph you weren’t going to be negative this morning!” If you’re keeping score at home, this IS me being positive. 

As I sit here trying to be positive and spread the words thereof, I must (and you must) start with questions. The really deep ones, I think. 

What does happiness mean for you? 

What specifically is so wrong about where you are and what you’re doing?

What are the things that I can control and change?

What is truly important to me?

Am I willing to work on the things I want to change even if they run contrary to a lot of how I’ve previously established myself?

Who does number two work for!!?!?!? 

Or don’t ask those questions. Maybe start smaller.  Be grateful for the day, or even smaller. Stop and consider the day. At the least you’ll stop for a second and breathe, and hopefully notice something. Maybe not but every time I do this I do. 

Of late, I’ve tried pretty hard to steer clear of the touchy feely stuff, because mostly it started sounding repetitive, as does most of this. This is not only okay, but it’s needed. Desperately. 

It’s needed so badly because we don’t fucking listen. We hear (sometimes) and keep moving along. We don’t stop. We don’t consider and for the most part we don’t do a fucking thing about it, and so, we have to hear it over and over and over. (This ends the profanity laced portion of our program.)

I say this because I know this. I do this. Every. Single. Day. 

And so do you. 

If you’ve gotten this far and declared “what a load of malarkey!” I understand. A few years back I posted something about “believing your own bullshit (oops, one more), because no one else will if you don’t.”  A friend chimed in about how much of a narcissistic douche that sounded. He wasn’t completely wrong or right.   I still believe it though.  I believe if we are going to say the things we believe, that we’d best believe them, or else they are just more noise. There’s enough of that these days. 

I guess that the reminder today is this. No matter where you are, your world is mostly inside your skull. Not in traffic, not in some quaint town you thing you should be in, not in a bigger house with an outdoor kitchen you won’t use any more than your indoor. It’s not in the things or the places. It’s in the 2.98 lbs of gray (grey?) matter protected by the occipital, temporal and frontal bones of the skull. Everything is there, and we hold much more power over it than we give credit to. But that is a constant daily process and it takes stopping and recognizing and recalibrating. A lot of it. 

Today I leave you to go for a run. A run I didn’t want to go on, but after spending some time here I realize there’s a lot to be happy with here, my home. Baton Rouge, LOuisiana. I’ll check out the lakes, that are beautiful (slightly sewery, but whatever).  The oak trees. I’ll think about grey matter, about connecting happy synapses, about how good I’ve got it and I’ll control my little slice of the world for awhile, maybe even form the rest of the day. 

I hope you can too. 

#hugsandhi5s