Happiness

It is an overwhelming, complicated and frustrating world for certain. There are frightening events happening everyday, outrageous things, things that make us say what-t-at?  Peace and happiness are states very hard to reach and to hold on to, for most of us average humans.  Far wiser people than I, have said much about the pursuit of happiness. You know, that constitutional guarantee...not the happiness itself, just the right to pursue it.

I've always been impressed by the ability of some smart folks to lay out such pearls of wisdom in just a few words.  I love quotes and they often inspire a whole train of thought that makes me ponder the answers to life's vast questions.  My quote this week, made well over seventy five years ago, is a great one.  It has to do with the small things, not the huge mistakes that we make, the big destructive behavior that we preform but just the stupid little things that we seem to repeat that make our lives very frustrating.  Reminds me of another of my very favorites that more or less says, Don't keep repeating the same behavior and thinking you will get different results.

I'm just repeating the wisdom of many, you are truly the only person that can make yourself happy, you are responsible for your own happiness, no matter what life if throwing at you.  I'm more or less saying what I said in an earlier blog about getting organized, one little step at a time.  Don't try to remake your whole life, your bad habits or destructive attitudes in one day.  Pick some small thing that, if you put your mind to it, you could either improve or plain stop it...quit repeating that behavior.  Sometimes the organizing thing is very close to the frustration of your life. In other words, if you just make a solemn promise to yourself,  "I will never walk in this house and put the car keys anywhere but right there on that hook"....immediately you are a touch more organized but more important, you are far less frustrated and therefore a touch happier. 

Sometimes being happier is about rewards and sometimes it is about discipline.  If you're a frustrated writer and keep telling yourself, I don't have time or when I get a nice place to sit and write...stop it today.  Clear away a spot, a corner and sit for one hour. Write, or make notes or just think about what you want to write.  Just one hour and go back to it another day and do the same.  The two things that you can take control of in this world, are your environment and your actions. 

There are some awesome and spectacular people, the I'm going to climb that highest mountain type of person. Let's get real, most of us are NOT that. Personally, I've always felt those people teeter right on the edge of insanity.  The huge majority of us just want to find happiness, perhaps would like to feel that we made someone else happy.  That is a goal that any one of us can accomplish. Forget the mountain, merely move that one small rock from your path and go forward. Don't look where you've been and don't worry about the rocks farther ahead. Find your joy in the path you cleared right in front of you.

9.11 Are You Prepared?

In my lifetime...and that's getting to be a pretty sizeable number of years...there has been nothing more sad and horrific than the events of September 11, 2001.  Whether you were impacted close and personally or whether you were hundreds of miles away, this was an attack on America and it deeply affected us all.  Yes, life did go on for millions of us. After the burials, the mourning, the cleaning up and rebuilding, the country had a deep wound that for some will never completely heal.  Make no mistake, though life did go on, that was not the intentions of the attackers.

In the more than 200 years since we fought for our independence, died and sacrificed to establish the United States of America, no foreign enemy has ever attacked us on our own soil.  On a grand "War" scale, it might seem now that this was a minor attack.  This is not so.  It doesn't matter if an enemy turns your own citizens into traitors, as in the Boston Marathon atrocity... if a lone assassin creeps across a border that is totally breachable with a small suitcase that could blow up  half of Texas or Arizona or California...or if a missile its lobbed right into our bellies. It is death and destruction to our citizens and our way of life.  There is a determined and growing enemy on the march and their goal is to see that America and it's way of life NOT continue forward. 

We cannot deceive ourselves that this is a small and weak enemy, that we are invincible to their attacks.  This enemy will chop our people's heads off and proudly film it, this enemy will use their own innocent children as shields, this is an evil enemy that believes anything is justified to achieve our annihilaltion.  Every small act of terror they impose on an American is a huge victory for them.

Having said all this, these things that a very large number of Americans are already aware of but so many more are oblivious to, I have to say, Are you prepared?  If our enemies are able to perpetrate an attack on any scale or if a catastrophe of nature occurs, can you protect and provide for your family?  The cold hard facts are that we cannot control the majority of events in the world.  We must make some plans and preparations for our own survival. A friend said to me recently, "I'm making some preparations that would maybe get me through two months. If the world isn't getting back together by that time, who wants to stay around?"  I think, always, some is better than none. I don't fault that reasoning at all.  I've got to say that if you've given thought and resources to being self sufficient for even a short time, I'd like to talk to you on your "deadline" day...you think you might use your ingenuity and resources and hang in a few more days?  

Water, because humans cannot survive without drinkable water.  Beans, because you must have sustenance. Bullets, because you must protect your water and beans. 

Get Organized

A dear friend of mine told me that she had once been told, "You love the idea of organization, but you're not."  I'd say that is the case with the majority of us.  In my particular weird case, I am...organized that is.  I'm compulsively, OCD, anal-ly organized.  Since I always self analyze, I would say it comes a great deal from a young life where I had very little control.  Keeping order in my surroundings is my way of controlling.  There's still a huge portion of life that I have no power over but I can keep my little world ship shape and no one can stop me from it.

Of course, there are multi degrees of organization and dis-organization; from the complete slob, the person surrounded in clutter and disorder or the dysfunctional hoarder to the irritating nut that you literally could eat off of their kitchen floor and their home feels cold, you're afraid to touch anything.    You never sat a dish down in my grandmother's living room, it went straight to the sink and was washed, dried and put in it's place.  My mother-in-law was  not a dirty or unsanitary housekeeper but an incurable clutter bug and my own mother was a complete little pig.   I do have to say, I never knew a truly messy and unorganized person that seemed truly happy. There is something to be said for the Chinese philosophy of Fung Shui, the art of being in harmony and balance with your surroundings. 

Honestly, a person that is buried in their own clutter is truly a frustrated person. How much time can you happily waste, searching for something that you never put back in the same place twice, moving things around so you can put something else down, digging through piles of clothing or papers or what-ever?  Wouldn't be the first time that I was completely wrong, maybe some unorganized people are perfectly happy, it seems to me that most are very scattered and unhappy.

In the spirit of  let's get our s--t together, here's some of my personal suggestions to clear away your life a bit.

            ---Make up the bed. I know, you're going to get back in it. Doesn't matter, just make it up.
         
           ---Don't let the clutter of all the things you need to organize, overwhelm your mind.  Just pick one small thing.  Maybe the closet where you've been piling everything or smaller, just that catch all drawer.  Maybe the desk where you want to sit down and write, but depresses you to even look at it. Just choose one small area and work on organizing that spot to the max. 

          ---Containers and labels are BIG.  Contain it...herd it up...get six cheap laundry baskets, get six free boxes, empty coffee containers....don't place loose piles of any thing any where. Those piles tend to grow and spread. Label it. Socks, shoes, dirty, clean, mail, tomorrow, today, pencils, take outside....once you've stuck a label on, NEVER put anything except what it says in that container, even if one is empty and the other overflows.

          ---Do it right now, not in a minute.  If you're through with whatever is in your hand, walk right to where that "thing" goes and put it there.  If you're taking off your shoes, the moment you stand on your bare feet, walk to where they go.  And, I don't mean go outside in a huge storm to put away that "thing" in the shed.  You have a box for that, don't you?

         ---Chairs and sofas and beds were not designed as clothes racks. That's what hangers, closets and drawers are for.  Floors are supposed to be covered with rugs, useful pieces of furniture and feet. Flat surfaces, counter and table tops are meant to have smooth expanses of clear space. Cabinets, drawers and shelves were created to keep these expanses clear and available for all the temporary tools of daily life that we need to place there.

You will be amazed at how much simpler life will be if you just organize.  The best thing is when you have no control over other things in your life, when you are feeling depressed or overwhelmed, you will find such reward in just pulling together a single area of your world.  Even if it's just one drawer, it's a physical accomplishment. You can stand back and say Now, that looks good. Just do it.

Necessities of Life

This may be offensive to some people...well of course it will, in our times EVERY thing is offensive to SOME body.  I have had personal experience with the destructive and bad results of  over indulging in alcohol.  Most of us have someone in our family who has an abuse problem, perhaps knew someone that was hurt or killed by a drunk driver or at a minimum knows what it's like to wake up with that "I doubt I will live through the day hangover" from a fun night the previous evening. Having established that I understand all the negative attributes of alcoholic beverages, I want to state that the availability of a little nip on occasion is one of the necessities of life.

Yep, you heard me. I believe that as a survival tool, both in our present day world or in a world where catastrophe has befell us, a smidgen of alcohol will be imperative.  I once had a critic say of the characters in one of my first novels, They sure do drink a lot.  Really? I guess I never thought of it as a lot.  The characters not only liked their evening "cocktail", they were scavenging for alcohol for it's medicinal use and for it's bartering value.  On a story about Preppers, I saw a minister that had dozens of bottles of booze stored. He believed that it's value as a trading item would be priceless, he was right and smart.  Also, there are very good medicinal purposes as an antiseptic or an anesthetic. 

Think about it.  You're in a post disaster world, you've spent a long day searching for food and purifying water, hoping your chemical mask has protected you from the diseases floating around out there.  You've been fighting off the bad people who didn't do one flippin' thing to prepare for even a minor catastrophe...Zombies (if you believe in such) or just those folks who are starving and totally p.o.'d because the McDonalds is all busted up and closed, their cell phone is down and none of the plugs are working to charge it. You don't think that just a small alcoholic beverage would take the edge off that day? 

The thing is, some of my days in the so called normal world, feel like that.  Life is spectacular these days and hard, complicated, full of things we have no control over.  A toddy at the end of the day can put things right back into mellow perspective.  My ninety year old mother-in-law, god rest her soul, used to call and say, "Honey, if you're going to the county line?"...that was the mystical place where stores exist with shelves of booze and you can buy all you want if you just put one foot on the other side of that boundary..."would you get me a small bottle of whiskey. You know, it helps me sleep." Indeed, it did. That precious woman would take just a shot of bourbon before bed and it was a great sleep aid.

So, my point is, I think that a good smooth alcoholic beverage of your choice is one of the nice necessities of life. Have a bit on hand, you never know when you might need a sip.  JO