GK: The road to contentment is sitting right here
The column: 09.01.21
An old pal is locked up with COVID this week and another pal is dealing with QAnon relatives who think liberals are vampires and another pal is suffering anxiety about having ringworm infestation, which his doctor says he does not have but he lies awake at night worrying and has been put on antianxiety medication, which doesn’t help all that much.
I’ve never suffered from anxiety, I don’t know any QAnon people and I don’t have COVID, so I am going to skip complaining today. I’m old and out of touch, and, as the old gospel song says, “This world is not my home, I’m only passing through” so what is the point of complaining, it’d be like going to Vladivostok and asking people to please speak English, or going to church and when the usher comes by with the collection plate, putting in a twenty and asking for a whiskey sour. Wrong time, wrong place.
I am a lucky man and these are wonderful times and we are all fortunate to be living now, in September of 2021, and of course there is poverty and disease and suffering and ignorance and cruelty and crabby people and inferior food and lousy service and poor Wi-Fi and unruly children and robocalls trying to sell you aluminum siding and this cursed printer that says there’s a paper jam though there is not, but there are beautiful advantages that our elders didn’t enjoy, and let me be grateful for the anti-seizure medication and blood thinner that keep me chugging along and YouTube, which has just now, for my benefit, played Don and Phil Everly singing “Let It Be Me,” and all it took was googling a few words and there it is, tender brotherly harmony.
We didn’t have cellphones back in the day and now we do, and so, as the Everlys sing and the GPS lady guides my wife through a maze of colonial streets in small towns on the coast of Connecticut, I can text my daughter and tell her I love and miss her, all simultaneously, and wind up at a nearby café overlooking Long Island Sound.
The most wonderful thing I have today that wasn’t available to me before is old age. The TV offers us dozens of channels, each with hundreds of shows and movies that we could access at any time, and the phone in my hand offers every streaming music format known to man, any radio network, a choice of thousands of podcasts, puzzles, news headlines, books on Kindle — we could be thoroughly entertained for a thousand years and I decline. There were a couple decades when I traveled more or less constantly and sometimes I’d go into a men’s room in some faraway airport and think, “I was here two or three years ago.” Now I’m happy to sit and look at the boats moored at the dock, a red light flashing at the end and Jay Gatsby on his nice lawn across the Sound looking over and envying us.
There is vast personal freedom to choose from the catalog of gender, hair colors, neuroses and syndromes, conspiracy theory, tattoos. Back in my day, only the men who ran the carnival rides had tattoos, former felons operating the roller coaster, and now young women have Gothic symbols on their backs and thighs and around their belly buttons, and so could I, and I don’t. There are ten thousand options available to me and I choose to subscribe to none, which makes this moment all the sweeter when I sit outside with my love, touching her knee, watching the clouds drift in over the housetops, hearing distant geese.
As they say in Denmark, “Shut up and be beautiful.” I think about the beef taco I had for lunch and the salad with fresh tomato and basil, a very self-accepting cucumber, and a beautiful sliced onion, not a bitter resentful onion but an exuberant one. I think it may have started out as a cabbage but it transferred out of the program, wanting to be a root, and met other onions, experimented with different dressings and finally settled on straight oil/vinegar with ground pepper. A beautiful salad. Who cares about a salad? You do, my dear reader. I know you do. I used to have countless readers and now here we are, the two of us, peas in a pod. Thank you for staying with me to the end.
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MIDWEST DANCE I went dancing one night in east Lansing And Minot was hot as could be I found what my heart wants in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, And asked a Nebraskan to please marry me. We had a thrilling sojourn in Billings And necked in the dark in Bismarck. And were even more torrid in Fargo-Moorhead And at dances in Kansas (in Overland Park). We sowed wild grains across the Great Plains Spent a wild youth in Duluth Found euphoria and joy in Peoria, Illinois, And my all in St. Paul — it’s you — that’s the truth. I’m by love possessed and who could have guessed I would find it here in the Midwest. ********************************************
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We would love you to join us for our first trek out on the road in either Ladysmith, WI (9/11) or Menomonie, WI (9/12). Masks will be required at our indoor performances out of safety and concern for the patrons, crew and talent. Check out some of the area hotels for a weekend get away.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g60020-Ladysmith_Wisconsin-Vacations.html
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g60083-Menomonie_Wisconsin-Vacations.html
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Garrison, Thanks for the many good thoughts in today's article.
There are a several "puzzles" about life. The more electronic gadgets and labor saving devices we have, the less free time we have. When I was young I worked forty hours a week at a job and still had enough time to keep the yard, go to church, listen to PHC, and do many other things. Now I don't have a job but still can't keep the yard or do much other than read things on the internet and walk the dog. We don't go anywhere because of covid. I am not sure what I do everyday but I don't accomplish much and it takes all day to do it. The less I do; the faster time goes by.
"The road to contentment" On the internet someone attributes this quote to Buddha: "Health is the greatest gift, Contentment the greatest Wealth, Faithfulness the best relationship."
Some of my Christian friends roll their eyes and become outraged and angry when I start quoting Buddha but Buddha had a good way of looking at life. And Buddha did not claim to be a god; in fact I believe that he said that he was not a god.
But Buddha also said that the source of unhappiness is wanting things. Happiness is not something one looks for; it is something that one is. Don't look for contentment; just be content. What we look for is often what we find.
We should all be grateful and thankful for our lives and that we were born in the United States in the twentieth century. Luck, along with industry and work, has a lot to do with how we come out in life. We could have been born in the middle of the dark ages or born in terrible conditions or could have had terrible parents. When I see pictures of the homeless and unemployed on television, I often think "there but for the grace of God. . . "
Best wishes to one and all.
Out of touch is not a bad thing. My mama taught me to be careful what you touch, so the "out of" works for me. Being old is not a bad thing, either. It's a milestone some don't make. And I'm with you on the Whiskey Sour...at church or any place else!