Carbless Happiness

It’s a challenge I give myself every Sunday. And now that I’ve been teaching for almost five years in this same calling, I no longer doubt its importance. I apply the same fighting of assumptions and the same contrarian attitude to my lesson preparation. It’s less about cutting out quotes, and more about waiting for the lesson to reveal itself. It sounds weird, but it works. Two Sunday’s ago, in this same fashion, I came to the following conclusion: living a little bit more like sand would help us all.

If you haven't heard the story about the man that built his house upon the sand, then I can't help you. Sand, I went on to say to the class, has been greatly mis-represented in this one story, leading us all towards a heavy reliance on the physical concept of rock. Of course, not an actual rock, but on the physical characteristics of rock: solid, firm foundation, reliable, confident, immobile, weathered, etc. However, we tend to forget it's somewhat negative characteristics: immobile, hard-headed, stuck, rough, sharp, disdainful, oppressive, egotistical. As is typical, rock has a hard time understanding that it has negative characteristics...because well, it's rock.

Sand, while it can be blown to and fro by the smallest of winds, and it is unattached and selfish in it's bearing attaching itself at a mere whim to other sand around it, only to leave it's fresh companions to other greater/lesser pursuits simply because it can, sand has some fantastic characteristics. Sand can morph. One day it can be a sand castle and the next it can be a hand-print...or a footprint. Sand is easy going, eager to please, open to new ideas and new places. Sand can be pounded without shattering. It can be twisted and turned without damaging it's neighbors. While rough at times, it can with little effort become transparent and beautiful.

Although, Sand presents fear. Rock is something that can be understood, located, stamped, and cataloged. Sand can be elusive (ever tried to find that piece of sand that made it's way up your bathing suit?), gritty, uncomfortable, and it can shift with surprising speed which can be disconcerting. Sand is an unknown that frightens Rock, especially as Rock perceives the Sand's tendency to forcibly weather it, to smooth it's edges, and in essence to change it's shape, without its consent.

So what then?

If you are a bit too much Rock these days, let yourself be moved, let yourself experience new things, let yourself let go of the obsessive control you believe is necessary to remain on your designated path. If you are a bit too much Sand these days, commit to an idea, commit to real changes in your life, test a principle.

And remember, every life needs a sandbox.

Admittedly, I'm the type of person that gets intense personal satisfaction from proving skeptics wrong. A perfect example has to do with spanking children. Every person I told that I wouldn't be spanking my kids gave me this big smile and a big we'll see how long that lasts look (or sternly warned, 'you have to be a parent not a friend'...idiots). It's that supposed wisdom that raises the hairs on my neck and has been a part of my strong dis-taste for authoritarian (e.g. Alphas) figures throughout my life.

So, after reading some headlines about some recent pop culture experiments in marriage, it got me thinking: I wonder if I can find someone that disagrees with this idea...come on now, tell me I can't do it. :)

Is my daily happiness a factor of doing what others think can't be done? This would explain a lot about my desire to surprise instead of simply fulfilling the status quo (remember those ten dozen roses in Vegas Teri, and all of those sweetest/valentines/other lame holidays without a single flower?). A monkey can repeat a task over an over again. But to seek out why the task is being done and how to do it better, to thirst for new challenges and knowledge, to scale new heights in one's personal development, that's something unique, that's something to live for. Complacency (a form of wickedness in my book of life) never was happiness.

I’ve never felt that uncomfortable/misplaced, unless you count freshmen or sophomore year in High School during my mandatory aquatics class; those damn blue swim trunks were unforgiving in every way imaginable...

So, why did I feel uncomfortable? I’ve never been that close to so many well dressed and under dressed women at the same time; pajama tops all the way down to high heels. When I add in the nachos, drink, and the relative obscurity of the whole thing, it starts to sound fun in the guilty pleasure kind of way. But, no, it was neither more nor less than a movie to me. However, I came to realize, this was so much more than a movie to everyone else in the theater.

Sex in the City is the hallmark of a cinema movement towards protagonist female characters that suffer at the whim of the antagonist male. I remember watching my first episode and thinking, "wow, I don't know women like that..."…at least that’s what I thought before going to the midnight premier of Sex in the City, the movie at the request of my wife.

If you are a guy, think The Matrix. If you are a girl…well, um, I’m not sure how to explain it beyond think about the men in your life and their relationship to the original, The Matrix. I was at the opening night of the Matrix Reloaded, which was as far as I know the top grossing opening weekend for a rated R movie. I remember the buzz in the theater as I watched the first Matrix on my laptop before it began with hollers from behind me to “hold it up so everyone else can watch”. The screen darkened. A hush fell over the audience. Then came the tell tale cascade of glowing green digits and the audience exploded.

Fast-forward some five years; there I was at the premier of Sex in the City, the Movie. Honestly, I was caught off guard by the audible gasps, moans, laughing out loud, and huge intakes of breath at the mere name of a famous designer, a slighted female, a dress in all of it’s…dressy glory, or a pair of shoes. And right beside me, my dear wife gasped too. At one point I had to check myself, because my chuckles at all of the sighing and gasping around me threatened to garner me the unwanted stares of hundreds of offended females, and had already earned me a few slaps from my smiling wife. Honestly, I never imagined that a dress or a pair of shoes could be occasioned with so much feminine admiration. But then it clicked. This must be the same reason why stop-motion filming, the bullet flying over Neo as the camera spins around him, and the utter coolness and “wow’s” that are heard across "masculinandom" are so incomprehensible to those of the typical feminine persuasion.

“Whoa, did you see that?” - “Oh no he didn’t!”
“That punch!” - “Those shoes!”
“Those guns!” - “That dress!”
“Nice leather body suit!” - “Mr. Big!”

I’m not sure how to quantify what I gained through my experience, although I do know whatever it was, none of my buddies have been one with the feminine mind for a full two plus hours (something that typically lasts them no more than five or ten minutes).