You Can’t Gratitude Your Way Out of It …

Be grateful for your health. Be grateful for your job. Be grateful for your kids, their health. Be grateful for your house. Be grateful for the opportunity. Be grateful you woke up in the morning. Be grateful for the sun, the beach, the weather …

Gratitude became something I hung onto when a sinkhole appeared on the yellow brick road. I’m sure a lot of people activate that inner appreciation vibe and give thanks.

That’s a good thing. Gratitude. Needs to happen to get you out of that funk. You can’t be a bitter and angry Gargamel. You need to open up that Silver Linings Playbook. Excelsior!

But sometimes you can gratitude yourself into staying in a bad situation, and that can’t be good either. Well at least I have my health … Health can’t be the only thing you have because what happens when the day comes that you don’t get to say that? When you don’t have your health?

Sometimes you get stuck in the moment and then you realize holy crap I forgot. I used to have more. This is not me.

Sometimes it comes to you when you see a younger version of yourself, one wearing bell bottoms with that Farrah Fawcett killer hair. Maybe it’s the one at the park when you used to watched Saturday morning cartoons in your Scooby Doo chanclas, followed by a park outing. It’s that Kodak moment that takes you back to wanting something more and knowing you deserve it.

So you snap out of it. You realize you can’t gratitude yourself out of every situation. You just can’t. Keeps you stagnant and false. You realize that when you actually can’t say “well at least I have my health..”

So you move in a different direction, a more balanced version. And you have better moments, some where the sun rising is genuinely what sparks gratitude.

And you see a younger version of yourself smiling and you feel you’re making your way back. You caught yourself and now you’re making a U-turn. You’re making adjustments and finding a way back. You’re grateful that you’re finding your way back 🙂

Buen Camino…

.

.

Advertisement

Words on Wednesday

It’s not always easy celebrating someone’s life while at the same time remembering someone who passed away. It’s an anniversary you’d rather forget. 

July becomes a test of mental and emotional strength every year. Finding the right balance of happiness for kids getting older and reaching milestones and fighting back the sadness because grandpa’s gone and he’s missing out on life he would have enjoyed living. No advice on how to tackle that, how to feel happiness and joy, while sadness lingers in the back and creeps up on you when you don’t expect it. You just take it as it comes and give it what you got.

Finding the happiness in kids turning double digits.  That’s 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 10! Remembering Harold and The Purple Crayon and Goodnight Moon like it was last week. Play-Doh and bubbles. Pictures drawn in Crayola Crayons and paints that come in plastic jars. Rainbows, puppies, snakes, flowers, and smiling stick figures. Now she’s using colored pencils and practicing her best Bob Ross skills on sketch pads and easels with fancy paper. Hitting home runs, watching Bear Grylls, jumping off diving boards, and learning everything about penguins. That’s what happens when kids turn ten.

Then you get a kid turning 13. Yup. The teen begins. Random clerks at a store chuckling and shaking their head at you saying ‘oh, 13, that’s gonna be a fun year for you.’ Like they know something, a parent secret, but not telling you because you’re about to find out in a BIG way. 

13.

Sounds ominous.

I don’t remember it being that way.

But then again I was the 13-year old. Not the parent of one. 

Here we go. On a new roller coaster ride and I don’t know where the turns are, but they’re coming. 

Now no more TV shows with animated characters, they got shows with people and issues. Got my own Wonder Years experience going on here with questions about getting cell phones and driver’s permit. Hang on a second! This one is a to be continued … and those three dots right there, that’s what’s gonna make it interesting. 13 and in 8th grade. I imagine a lot of goings on will be going on. It’s puberty. It’s transition. It’s voice cracking, stinky socks, and peach fuzz on the upper lip about to become a full Magnum P.I. style mustache. It’s funny. But it’s not.

But at least sports is still a common denominator and I still rock as coach and trainer and they come to me for guidance and I can give advice and they’ll listen. Through sports I can still teach life lessons, even without them fully knowing it. It’ll sink it.

I hope. 

13 and 10.

I’ve become a life coach to kids in double digits. It happens to every parent, I know. I’m just realizing it’s happening to me while at the same time celebrating someone that would have been 73, but was taken away too soon.

I imagine a lot of untold stories went with him and I feel bad about that, about not hearing the rest of them, about the unfinished life he had and the years as a grandpa robbed from him. It’s sadness and joy. He probably had so many more memories and pieces of life to share with me, about when he was 10 or 13, or the parent of one. But now I can only hold onto what I got. That’s the tough part. Knowing he had more but we never got around to it because unexpected sickness happened and that sucked. 

From one day to the next. Celebrating your kids to grieving your dad. It’s a state of funk that’s difficult to navigate. But you get up and keep moving. That’s July for me. The world keeps moving even if you want it to stay still. It moves with or without you. 

So I found myself celebrating and being happy one day, sad the next, and bumping it up again the following week. 

No rules on how to do it, just finding ways to live through it.  So even though this writing hiatus was unplanned it was probably needed. Sometimes the words just don’t come out and it was probably for a reason. Settling in and coming off my own birthday as well, trying to turn the page and get the creativity going. I got another 365-day journey around the sun, so it’s a good time to start again. So I went off on an outdoor adventure, away from people, away from the city and tried something new.

Sometimes the Outdoors sprinkles a little magic and you feel different. Sometimes not. 

But luckily that day the cloud of funk lifted and the getaway brought perspective.

 

Buen Camino!

.

.

Feel Good 5 Friday

Sometimes you just run out of patience and it’s only Wednesday.

I mean I had nothing left in the tank and what made matters worse was the judgement. You know, when people who have no business judging you, go on and preach and you stand there thinking whaaaaaaaaaat? Mannnn, you’re not even in the arena how you gonna judge me. Some people shouldn’t even let out a whisper because the hypocrisy of their voice might just have lightning strike.

The judgement sucks especially when I’m already my harshest critic.

Writers. Artists, Athletes. Parents. People in general

We all have that extra sass in the back pocket just in case we didn’t feel bad enough about how the day was going, you got that zinger. That inner dialogue playing tricks on you when what you need is the strength of your inner superhero, sometimes he’s just stuck in the costume change.

You’re gonna need to wait a minute

So there were a lot of mixed feelings and emotional hangovers rolling over in the middle of the week. Got me thanking the universe for boxing and the sunshine on my back as I ran in the mornings. The pandemic minimizes the getaways, but a quick staycation would be good. Might have to plan another nature escape in order to recharge our batteries. Sometimes staring at your vision board isn’t enough, you got to make your own postcard. Even if it’s not pinned to the board, the trip will still be memorable and important for your sanity, because moving forward is a pace. Doesn’t have to be fast, just forward.

But until then, the eclectic bunch of feel good tunes got me bopping my head and feeling the beat, instead of focusing on the frustration of the moment. Releasing negative energy and breathing in something better, that’s Feel Good 5 Friday.

Buen Camino my friends!

Real World — Matchbox 20

Camisa Negra — Juanes

Keep Ya Head Up — 2 Pac

Some Nights — Fun

Born to be Alive — Patrick Hernandez

.

.

.

What Did I Get at the CVS? Advil, Chocolate, and Wisdom.

Photographed by Bradley Wentzel

“YOU CAN’T MOVE VERY FAST
IF YOU’RE CARRYING A LOT OF BAGGAGE.”

—April Holmes, Paralympic Gold Medalist, 100 meter dash

I found this quote the other day as I was flipping through a magazine at the CVS. Now I don’t do a lot of soul-searching while I’m waiting in a long line to pay for Advil and chocolate. Most of the time I’m wondering why the self-check out aisle is not working properly, or why I just didn’t buy the stuff when I was at the supermarket the day before. But sometimes a lesson just comes out of the blue.

I imagine that after losing her leg in a train accident this chick was pretty much not wanting to hear the silver lining to losing a major appendage, but I guess she did.

The advice appears to be basic common sense that people at airports or train stations follow. I mean if you’re running to make your plane or your train, you know that your carry-on baggage is going to slow you down and you might even miss that plane or train. I mean it would be easier if you had one of those carts. In truth it would be easier if you had no baggage. But nevertheless there you are running all crooked, hair flying everywhere, shoulders killing you, luggage straps not really doing their job, and your knees not really cooperating during this sprint to the gate.  It appears that sometimes in real life we’re doing the exact same thing and this airport/train station wisdom escapes us.

It’s easy to get weighed down by all the crap in your life that isn’t going right — an accident, a job, a relationship, family drama, bills, or whatever crisis is making you eat tubs of rocky road ice cream at midnight. I know. I’m guilty of this. I admit it, it is easy.

But this Holmes makes a good point. She smacked me with some common sense. If you’re tied to your past (AKA your baggage) you’re not going to get very far in the future. Common sense, yes. But sometimes we have brain farts and this wisdom escapes us. Or maybe we just don’t go to the airport on vacations as much as we’d like, so the whole baggage weighing you down isn’t a recurring metaphor. But it’s all good. I get reminders … reminders at places like the CVS. So drop your bags, man! Drop ’em and go.