بخش 6

The Good Old Everyday

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Poet, essayist, pursuer of happyness

AN INTRODUCTION TO LESSONS 43 AND 44—ORDINARY LESSONS FOR HAPPYNESS

Well, as we come to our last stop on this ride, I have just a few more life lessons to share that come from the absolutely most obvious treasure trove. This is the world of everyday life, where all of us who are ordinary normal folks inhabit a classroom that really can teach us everything we need to be able to savor the happyness we have pursued.

The ordinary lessons that are learned in the everyday classroom, as I understand them, have nothing to do with smarts, how you think, whether you’ve mastered nuclear physics, or you’ve been blessed with blazing intellect or even an abundance of common sense. The lessons we’re here to explore are those we learn with our hearts.

LESSON 43

Don’t Postpone Joy

KEYWORD: Appreciation

Are you ready?

Here is your first assignment: Do one thing today for yourself that makes you happy.

“But I can’t!” “My schedule won’t allow it.” “I can’t afford to.”

Need I continue with any more excuses?

If you need some ideas, I’m happy to share with you some of the items on my list. Every now and then, a stop at the nearest soul food home cooking restaurant gives me joy. And you know how I feel about having my shoes shined or shining them myself. Pure joy is putting my feet up and hanging out with my kids.

So put something down on a piece of paper that you can do today. You got this, you know you do.

Next assignment: Do one thing for yourself that makes you happy every day. Put it at the top of your daily to-do list.

This lesson is self-explanatory, as you can see. Don’t postpone joy. If you haven’t felt joy in a long time and aren’t feeling it at all, let alone postponing it, your breakthrough might be right around that corner you haven’t been exploring lately. Go see what’s there. You may be pleasantly surprised.

I had a surprise waiting for me back in the middle of 2007 when a business trip to San Diego gave me the opportunity to spend some time with my mentor and friend Gary Shemano. After the conference was over, we decided we’d drive back to San Francisco together.

When it was time to hit the road, we went to throw our luggage in the back of his black Mercedes 500SL. Realizing that we were almost on empty, we headed to the nearest gas station to fill up. While standing there at the station, I noticed that his four-year-old car was so pristine, polished to almost blinding perfection, it looked brand new.

The convertible roof on Gary’s car looked like it had just been unwrapped from the factory.

“Gary,” I asked, “you ever take this top down and enjoy this car?”

“No,” he shrugged.

Then I asked him something else. “Do you ever listen to anything other than these radio rant talk shows?” “No.”

The time had come for me to teach a lesson to my mentor. “Look,” I said, “fill the tank, move over, I’m driving.”

With the tunes on, we screeched out of the gas station and onto the freeway, pedal to the metal. Top down, music blasting, soaring up to the Bay Area at about 80 mph, we sang, laughed, talked, and whooped it up all the way there—truly loving, savoring, and appreciating the moment.

Gary admitted that it was totally a new experience for him and a learning one at that. Proof positive—tigers can indeed change their stripes.

When we arrived at our destination, we high-fived each other and went our separate ways, promising to remember not to postpone joy and also to appreciate every opportunity life brings.

The irony is that we are coming to this lesson much later than lots of folks, perhaps including you. Or maybe, like me and Gary Shemano, you’ve spent too much time pursuing what’s next and not enough appreciating what’s now.

The reality of being “multimedia” as I’ve become, at my own peril, is that my schedule is clocked to the point that I know where I’m going to be every day for the next eighteen months—sometimes down to the scheduling of each meal. That’s a far cry from not knowing where the next meal was going to come from. And it’s definitely something I appreciate. Then again, it’s overwhelming to look at a schedule like that. You can miss all of now by constantly having to check to see where you have to go next. That is why I am so thankful for having learned to appreciate, be, enjoy, and experience the now and the where of the present.

Often when I am out on the road, conversation may lag and the question arises as to what city is next on the agenda. My consistent response is, “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that right now, I am right here with you.” People appreciate this answer and what’s more, it sends a reminder to my heart to soak up the energy of where I am—to be present in the present, to be here now in the here and now.

Your next assignment, then, is to take a minute—sixty seconds—to be where you are now and experience the joy of it. Appreciate it. If nothing joyful comes to the surface, reach back into the past for the memory of your happyest moment that you can conjure up and let it be your touchstone.

LESSON 44

Claim Ownership of Your Dreams

KEYWORD: Responsibility

It is not by random selection that I’ve chosen this lesson and its assignment as the last to share with you. The theme that the pursuit of happyness is more than a right or a privilege, but is in fact a responsibility, is one we’ve touched on throughout the lessons explored all along. Now is the moment of uttermost truth. Are you in? One hundred percent?

Any milquetoasty “well, all right, yes, I guess so” ain’t gonna cut it! If you’re not revving your own rocket engines right about now, it’s time for leadership—that is, your own. You’re the boss. You’re the woman. You’re the man.

The most powerful way to claim ownership of your dream, right up front, is to ask the questions that belong to you. The answers can produce a wealth of guidance, but ownership of your dreams, I believe, starts with your questions. Most of them begin with familiar words: what, where, why, how, who and what for, and definitely when.

The question now is from me to you. Are you ready for graduation from these lessons so that you can truly pursue your highest aspirations and Start Where You Are, like never before?

Now that you have finished your course work, it’s time for you to go and apply everything that you’ve learned or that you will continue to learn from your own life lessons. The point of this last life lesson—Claim ownership of your dreams—is to illustrate that the responsibility to do that is yours. Only you can determine your willingness to accept the good this universe can give you when you reach out your arms for it.

The subject of responsibility came up in an amazing close encounter that I enjoyed as I turned the corner one evening at festivities that I was honored to attend in South Africa, when I spotted none other than the icon, Sidney Poitier. If you know anything about his story, you may find it as fascinating as I do that he grew up on a tiny primitive island in the Bahamas without running water or electricity, yet today he is one of the most learned, enlightened human beings you could ever meet. He arrived in America at sixteen years old and had to teach himself to read and write, lived homeless at his start, worked as a dishwasher, and only stumbled onto an audition for actors because the theater happened to be close to a room he was renting at the time. His first audition was so terrible, the man in charge threw him out bodily and told him to stop wasting other people’s time and to just go back to his job as a dishwasher. Sidney couldn’t believe that the man knew what his job even was! Then and there, he made up his mind to seek the distant star and become an actor.

When I spoke to Sir Poitier, his eyes were full of light and curiosity on the subject of spiritual genetics. With a working knowledge of what most astrophysicists know and suspect about the origins of the universe, he challenged me to go further than our connection to our human ancestors—to connect our genetics to the beginning of time. If, as some believe, everything began with the big bang of a grain of sand—God in that form—we could each have that very power within us! “But whatever you do, Chris,” he said to me in all seriousness, “ask the big questions. The hour is late. Our planet needs all of us to ask the big questions.” With that powerful advice that we all need to take responsibility for the future of our planet and for our own futures, I leave you to do your homework and begin to write your acceptance speech for the attainment of your pursuit of happyness. You can thank whoever was part of making it happen in your life and you can spike the ball for yourself—it’s all up to you.

And one last postscript I want to add is that responsibility, like joy, should also not be postponed.