I am sitting on a couch at my family’s home with my family’s dog in my arms, and I’m happy to say that after the 7 minutes that I’ve been home, she’s stopped licking me and allowing me to type, with the caveat that her head must be on my wrist. Seems fair enough.
Today was a really happy day. I got to see my uncles and aunts and cousins and grandmother, I got to eat many courses of food, play football, climb playsets at the park and be king of the world, and spend $9 on a large popcorn with butter at the movies.
After some self-reflection, a few drinks, and an uncle who’s losing his hearing, I’ve come to the realization that I need to be more proud of what I’m doing. That’s a really hard thing to do. It’s easy to be happy and content with your family, the friends you have, or the city you live in, but to be proud of them? To look into the face of someone who shouldn’t know better and say that it’s an honour to share your life with them, to work alongside them, and to share good and bad memories with them. That’s something I don’t think about on a daily basis.
I’ll probably only think about my honour and pride if I’ve just come out of a movie about honour and pride.
I’m not one to wake up in the morning thankful of everything in my life. I’m certainly not thankful for my decision the night before to make the alarm clock go off so goddamn early. I’d rather find my way back to sleep before finding the beauty when I wake up and open my eyes to what I see. I could be seeing my girlfriend beside me, or the dawn, or maybe just enough minutes to get to work on time.
To take it one notch further, when I say that I appreciate something, I find that I’m saying it in dismissal in favour of a more personal point to prove. “I appreciate your effort, but I want to leave now.” Appreciation is something I can judge and observe, and if I don’t feel it at the end of the day, it doesn’t mean that I’m proud of how things played out. Maybe happy or content, but maybe not proud.
The more that I write, the more that I think building meditation and reflection habits are a good idea. I know the keyword here is ‘habits’. Man, there’s going to be a lot of habits to instill if I want to be the person I want to be. Maybe I’ll try to be more appreciative and proud of what’s in front of me, and if not, asking why, and then simply being content with the situations I’m in. We can’t be happy of everything, I know that, but can we be proud of everything? Can we be thankful and in debt to everything we have in this world – is that also what being proud of ourselves means?
Good questions to ask, I think. Hopefully, I can think about the answers when i wake up tomorrow…on time…Ugh.
2PM Good Morning 