The How of Happiness

Ok, here is what I came up with:

Cultivate optimism - find the silver lining in every dark cloud. Ask, "What's great about this?" 

Set aside time every week to just be with the people who are important to you in our life. Like the missus and bambinos. 

Connect to gratitude - write down what you're grateful for. It's a lot. You're blessed.

What are your three?

Are you sprinting east to see a sunset?

Can you handle my shortest post ever?!?!?!  I don't know if I can.  Can you handle two posts in two days?!?!?!?!  It's out of CONTROL.  I'm on FIRE!

What do we all really want out of life?  You might say fulfillment.  Growth.  Spiritual enlightenment.  A suitcase full of gangster cash.  So many answers, so little time.

But don't we all have at least one desire in common?  Happiness.  Who wants to be a sad sack, a human puddle, the flesh-and-blood equivalent of a scoop of ice cream tumbling out of its cone onto a pile of sawdust?  Nobody.

"I know I want to be happy, but I just don't know how," whined the big whiner inside all of us.  Here's an experiment.  Listen to this song four or five times in a row:

The How of Happiness Song

Put it on your touchy-touch phone device, set phasers on repeat, and jam out.  Stand up, let your hips move to the groove, make that goofy face that you always make on the dance floor when you know the club is too dark for other people to really see you making that goofy face.  You know the face I'm talking about, the one that says, "You all know I'm smoothe."

And then listen.  Let the words in.  It's strategy on a platter.  And we all need a good strategy.  As one of my mentors (that Robbins guy again) says, "If you're running east looking for a sunset, you're in trouble!"

After your fourth or fifth time listening to the song, run and get a pen and paper.  Run!  Write down three ideas that you got from the song that you can easily include in your daily activities.  Listen to the song a couple more times if you need to - don't forget to get groovy.

Post your list in as many places as you can so you see it often.

Then take action!  That's it: desire + strategy + action.  Rock it out!  Kick some heiney!

I'm doing this now.  I'll post my list soon.  Anyone else care to share theirs?

You walked on what?!

A bed of 2000 degree hot coals.  And here is a picture of my feet a few minutes post-potentially-stupid-thing-you-regret:

As you can see, my feet did not get burnt off into bloody cauterized stumps.  There they are, in all their glory, the same as they were before the fire-walk, if a little bit red from being slightly roasted. Any injuries? Well, the bottoms of my feet, the part touching the 2000 degree bed of hot coals that I walked over, felt sunburned after walking over the bed of 2000 degree hot coals.  Which I walked over this past Thursday night, in case you were wondering.

But Friday morning, most of the sunburned feeling was gone except for a small spot on my left footsie.  That was a nice surprise.

The other nice surprise I woke up to Friday morning was being able to say I did that fire walk.  And it's not even entirely about walking across the bed of hot coals.  That's really only the last few seconds of a process that extended over the course of many hours.

What was that process?  It was a multi-hour process of preparation that Tony Robbins, yes the guy from the '80's infomercials, led 4,500 of my closest friends through to show us that it is our free will, employed in a productive direction consistently over time, that allows us to break through our fears and achieve what we were meant to achieve.

Doesn't this sound so simple?  Isn't this just so obvious?  "What have you done, oh great and powerful Weissology," some of you might think.  "You spend a bunch of dough to get pumped up in a crowd full of kool-aid guzzlers, only to learn what you have known all your life?!  That you have free will and you need to exercise it to move ahead in life?!?!"

I'll answer via a badly chosen metaphor, couched in a bit of snooty meaningless elitism:

All of you, of course, will remember when I stopped watching the Oscars.  It was in 1999, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) failed to nominate Jeff Bridges for the award of best actor for his revolutionary performance as Jeffrey Lebowski in the Cohen brothers' classic film The Big Lebowski.  After that, for me, both the art and science were settled.  There could be no legitimacy in an organization that could not see what was right before its very eyes: that Jeff Bridges had changed the art of film acting forever with that performance.

I tell you this by way of introduction to the fact that, had it not been for Amanda, Chris, and Christophe, I would still be watching the Oscars today, a fish in a tiny bowl, overjoyed to be swimming to and fro in the soaked ignorance of my own limitations.

Amanda, Chris, and Christophe, friends in Los Angeles where I lived at that time, invited me over to watch The Big Lebowski, which had been released on video.  I saw it in the theaters, I told them, and I did not particularly like it.  They insisted, explaining the Rule of Cohen Brothers Films to me, a rule the existence of which I had theretofore been soakingly ignorant.

See, it goes like this.  The Cohen Brothers are geniuses.  But if you watch one of their films only once, you risk disliking or only mildly liking it.  It's on the second viewing that the true essence of the film reveals itself.

Having no alternative social plans, I accepted, joined them for the screening, and from that moment on understood why it's funny when my sister-in-law says, "I'm calmer than you," and why the AMPAS is a totally bogus organization comprised of echo-chamber back slappers who wouldn't know a break-through acting performance if it cut off one of their toes.

Fast-forward to 2013.  We can talk all day long about how important our free will is, how critical our life decisions are, how essential it is to harness the power of our inner motivation.  But sometimes it takes a real experience to shock us into the realization that the way we have been experiencing life was fish-bowl sized.

That's what the firewalk was for me.  In the moments after walking across that bed of hot coals, I was excited and proud of myself.  In the days following, including today, I am more pensive.  The real question is, "What must I achieve in life?"

And how must I deploy my free will day by day in order to prepare for the last few seconds of the process, the briefest yet flashiest part, the very end?

I am not turning into J.D. Salinger

And what I mean by that is that I'm not avoiding my throngs of thirsty fans, who have been deprived these many months of my greatness, by holing myself up in some compound in suburbia, only answering the door for the guy from the Amazon.com delivery service when he shows up with my Prime subscription monthly installment of two-ply bathroom tissue.  Which is I'm sure what Salinger does, assuming he's still alive.

My point is that I'm too lazy to Google whether or not Salinger has died, so you can bet I'm not posting because I'm, you guessed it, holed up in some compound...

Is lazy just another word for afraid of something?  I don't know, but in the spirit of self-knowledge with which this blogging experiment was initiated, I aim to find out, starting tomorrow afternoon at this event, which I still can't believe I actually signed up for:  http://bit.ly/13kwas8

Those of you who are not completely disappointed by my absence these many months might check in periodically over the next couple of days here: @weissology

I think that's a twitter thingy-majiggy.  I'll be posting (tweeting?) pictures of my feet before and after the firewalk.  That's FIREWALK.  Walking on a bed of red-hot coals.  Please don't tell my mother about this.  Or my father.  Or my salsa teacher.

I close this re-emergence from my suburban compound, surrounded by two-ply quilted comfort, with a promise to post more often.  I have a backlog of things to share.  For the next four days, I'll be backlogging that backlog.  And then the posting shall re-commence.  Huzzah!

Coming Up For Air

I almost can’t believe it’s been two months since my last post.  Almost.  But between the last post and these few words at midnight, before winding the mind down and after a decent bit of yoga, much has occurred.  Two months have passed in the blink of an eye, and during that time I completely recalibrated my priorities.

The dedicated throngs of Weissology faithful from Alaska all the way to Indonesia will dutifully recall that it was only just in the middle of last summer when I previously recalibrated my priorities as a result of the Text Message of Doom.

That was then; this is now.  That was me; this is Mrs. Weissology.

Three weeks after my previous post of 11/11/12, the better half went in for some surgery.  Fear mixed with brain-freezing fatigue.  Necessary preventive procedure.  Utterly life-changing.  That's a different blog.  I'm not sure I've fully wrapped my mind around that, in part because there simply hasn't been time.

She was only in the hospital for 24 hours, but recovery takes time, and while the lynchpin regained her strength over many weeks, four kids needed to be fed, dressed, shunted to and fro, diapered, snuggled, nose-wiped, finger-wagged, eye-rolled, laughed with, high-fived, read-to, forehead-kissed, group-hugged, tucked-in, and generally kept afloat.  Dishes needed washing and counters sprayed and wiped.  Floors needed sweeping and loads of laundry processed.  Bills needed paying and my regular day-job needed box-checking.

While my weight does not, as yet, indicate that it is so, I am but one man.  Okay, to be fair, my weight indicates currently that I am either one rather large man or two kind of scrawny ones, whereas previously it was more like one train wreck or two welterweights.  So that’s progress by any definition.

Nevertheless, I am only me.  And in the words of William Shakespeare, if you soak me, do I not prune?  The rhetorical answer to that most salient rhetorical question is, of course, no, I do not not prune, especially before the new dish-washing gloves arrived from Amazon.com.  But you catch my drift.

Since Mrs. W’s surgery, she has been my number one priority.  The children second.  The house third.  Everything else kind of gets thrown together in the crock-pot for a distant fourth.  I haven’t slept much.  And that’s taking into account the heroic contributions of both blood relatives and family-from-another-mother, so to speak, but for whom I’d be crouched on a sidewalk somewhere, wearing a tutu and drooling about the Voices.

There is a data point I must collect in this study of myself.  Me and my family - we are deeply loved.  Dear God, let that realization be enough of a prayer that I should be worth the trouble and strong enough to pay it all forward.

Beyond the sleep deprivation, I haven’t checked my blood sugar much, I haven’t exercised much, and I certainly haven’t written much.  What I can tell you is that, thank God, Mrs. W is doing great.  Making excellent progress.

I can also tell you that for the first time perhaps in all of my life, living those priorities in the absolute correct order felt liberating.  There is just something liberating in the knowledge that the activity of the moment is exactly the activity one was built for tackling in that moment.  Whether it’s helping someone up a flight of stairs post-operation; cleaning the kitchen at midnight; wiping the snot; kissing the forehead; reading Harry Potter with a cheeseball English accent.

In the study of myself, that is another point of data that I’d like to collect.  When push comes to shove, I am capable of behaving as if my family is the most important thing in my life, beyond merely saying so.

I bid the Weissology universe a good night.  I’m sweaty from the yoga, and now I must get some rest.  For tomorrow I must wake up a bit earlier than usual to check my blood sugar and fire up the oatmeal.  The good kind; the kind that warms the belly and evens out the glucose.