One day I woke up and I was 40. Well, not quite 40–39, actually but the point is the same. More than half my life is behind me (I should hit about 75 should I stay in AZ or even return to NYC–68 if I somehow wind up in Tennessee). I was watching Invincible, a Mark Wahlberg vehicle about Vince Papali and thought to myself, Man that dude is 43. There is a difference of only a few years and a great deal of gym time and wealth. Nevertheless, it got me thinking..
It is cliche to say that we only get one chance at life, but it is also accurate. Some of us spend each of those days working as hard as we can in order to generate a nest egg for retirement. Others live every day like its their last–until one day it is. Others still waste away slowly, munching on the social decay of our society, bored and anxious for the next episode of the bachelor to wind around so we can noisily poke fun or dream vicariously about how they live their lives. All of these are utterly valid ways to live and all of these I have done. Yet none of them are how I want to be. None make me happy.
For some time now, the idea of happiness has dominated my psyche. I thought at first that people made me happy. They can aid, enable, or disable my happiness, but the feeling comes from within and from a certainty that I am living the life that is ideal and best suited to me. Living a life that works–one where I am constantly growing and enabled to maximize my potential is, in fact, what happiness is.
I look around and see a few people who are doing that and there is that ever so slight twinge of jealously that they’ve reached that place that still beckons me. I am working towards it, day by day, opening the doors that need opening and shutting the ones that take me further away from success. It is a journey, but it isn’t one of those situations where the journey towards happiness is the whole story. The journey is the trip to the starting line. Becoming the best possible you, now that is a journey.
I’m speaking in abstractions tonight. This is because all the mechanisms that control whether or not we are happy and successful in life reside purely in our head–a space reached only through abstractions. It is about trust and belief and the courage to make the right choices–even when they are hard. I’ll tell you what a great mentor once told me, “Figure out what you need, and then you’ll figure out how to use it to get what you want.”