Find your Happy Place!

I feel it is my duty to tell you the following, in the name of sanity and good mental health.

Whatever brings you to your happy place and allows you to function in a world where everyone wants to throw their crap in your way like you are a brain sucking Zombie use it! And use it often!

I've been car less for almost two weeks now. First it was the timing belt. Then it got ran over in the driveway. Silverado v. Focus= Focus looses every time. And due to an amazingly persistent streak of bad luck I am separated from my happy time. I've been without easy Internet access and since I am always "available" (read: home) I have been under constant attack energetically. The dogs want me. My brother wants to talk all the time. My sister in law. My niece. Everyone at work feels free to throw their shit my way when I am trapped behind the folding table. And it's been too much.

I have two things that are able to make me forget about other people's crap and loose that overwhelming sense of immanent doom. One is listening to Matthias Reim. And thank god I managed to learn a few songs that get stuck in my head to keep me company. The other is being in a coffee shop where no one is rude enough to interupt the peace. A book would make everything better too. But that isn't happening due to funding issues. But that is okay because I can write when there are not people knocking on my cranium.

After two weeks of this kind of energetic and emotional torture I about lost it. The new guy actually noticed and tried to talk me down from the Tower I've locked myself in. Sweet for him to try. But having learned several good, rock-solid lessons about stringent interviewing processes for confidantes, I just needed to get me to the cafe!

Your happy places are necessary. Use them! If you don't have them get them! And be warned. There are people who will try to tell you that you don't deserve that kind of respite. In their eyes you are depriving them of something they want, usually your time and energy. There are those who will tell you that you are being selfish, causing inconvenience and in general just being anti social. You know what? Too bad for them! If those kinds of people lack the imagination and the intelligence to find their own safe havens then you have to leave them behind/alone/to drown in their own sorrows. How selfish is it to demand resources from someone else when you are too lazy to find resources yourself?

My happy place keeps me from busting people's chops. Anyone who has read my blog for long should be able to see a quick wit and a sharpened pen. Yes, most of the time I try to bring the funny. But be warned, funny smart people who are pushed to far can slice you to ribbons with their mighty pens when pushed too far. My happy place reestablishes my tact. It gives me a measure of patience which erodes daily under the simple stress of life. A happy place is what keeps most of us from acting like the serial killers. A trip to a happy place lets petty things slide off my back. You do realize that no one with the grace of God and patience of Job is that way by virtue of birth alone.... don't you?

Nice people snap. Good people break vases in anger. It's the happy place, reconnecting with God/the Universe and whatever that let's the positive traits take point when charging t hrough life's pitfalls. Yes. I could pray and expect that and some Bible study to work the same way it works for Billy Graham. But God didn't make me that way. God made me to like music and art of many kinds. God made me a fan of one of the Highest orders. In the Grand Scheme of Things, I guess, he decided that he didn't want to be alone in the cheap seats at a concert and thought I'd be fun to hang with. Awesome thing to be if you ask me. I wasn't born to lament every little thing in the world or just be a Prayer Warrior as they are called in the Christian realm. God makes each one of us special. And as a result none of us are going to find the happy in exactly the same way. It isn't for anyone else to decide what makes us happy and calm.

And it isn't for you or me to throw away those things to please someone else who doesn't want to find a happy place. Misery loves company, so they say. But misery doesn't like happy company. Misery likes to make people as Miserable as it feels so that it feels more normal. Why? Because it is the easy cheap answer.

Find your happy place damn it!!!!