Taking Ownership of Your Happiness: Sunday Musings 3/27/11
Sunday musings…
1) Time. Struggling with the 3 hour time zone difference between Cleveburg and San Diego. 4 days is simply too short to be comfortable in either zone.
2) Moonscape. I can’t decide if the foothills between San Diego and Ramona look more like some exotic scene from a Ray Bradbury novel, or a Chunky candy bar.
3) Open. Hotels are like hospitals, or at least they SHOULD be. Who ever heard of a 1000 room hotel in a convention city whose services are only open M-F?
4) Community. We had a spirited discussion over dinner last night about the Main Page here chez Crossfit and its place in the Crossfit community. It was kicked off by a well-known, universally beloved CF Cert “Flowmaster” who bemoaned the tone of the conversation. It’s his contention that it’s less hospitable here now.
Like so many things Crossfit our little world here on the Crossfit.com “comments” section, what I have called the Crossfit Dinner Table, our little world has changed these last 5 years. Some evolution…an occasional revolution…always change. In the beginning there was Crossfit Santa Cruz, the original HQ, the mystical, magical mecca which now exists only in our memories. The Crossfit community consisted of only the CF SC trainers and athletes, all of whom had physical access to Coach. A little web site in 2003 attracted an equally little following, one which grew to include a few thousand people when I arrived. Without the option to join your own CF SC you hung out here.
Friends were made. Heck, we have two pending nuptials among couples who literally met HERE! It was a good, magical place. Kindness abounded, and even the snarkiest of snarks, like the mystical, almost mythological Matt G., had a hidden heart of gold. It could be tough love, but it was always a kind of love. Now? Well, that particular part of the CF community has moved to Affiliate gyms, Affiliate blogs, and to some degree Facebook. Fractionated, sectional, and no longer a universal whole, the community is now more like the CAtholic Church: everyone is doing Crossfit with Crossfit somewhere, but each somewhere is not chatting with somewhere else.
So, whither the Main Page of Crossfit.com? I love it here. Heck, without the Crossfit.com comments section there would be no “bingo”. But things change. There is evolution. The community grows and it moves, splits and separates as it re-connects in new, unplanned ways. Truly, I have no insight on this question, and after much back-and-forth last night we were collectively without a consensus.
It will be a question to be answered by two people only, if an answer is to be had at all.
5) Happy. I met a profoundly unhappy young woman last night. She’s not depressed, and she appears to be otherwise healthy, but she is quite unhappy with a couple of very substantial parts of her life. Worse, she feels powerless to change this. Indeed, she feels oppressed by this unhappiness. As an outsider (she is a friend’s client and I’d never met her; I’ll likely never see her again) her core problem was blindingly clear:
She had relinquished ownership of her own happiness.
Few of us ever have ownership of the substantial aspects of our lives. Almost no one ever really owns a business, and most of those who do really just own a job. The majority of people work for someone who owns their job. Outside of work a surprising number of people own very little of their relationships; they allow others to drive, and their satisfaction and happiness is driven by others. They are the cheese to everyone else’s grater, little bits of themselves shaved off so that someone else can be happy.
I don’t think it has to be like that. I think that YOU own your own happiness, and that is what I told this young woman.
I think that YOU own your own happiness, or at least enough of it that it should take some very powerful force to take it away from you. It’s OK to move toward happy and away from unhappy. Really. You may not arrive there right away; heck, it may be a really long drive. But you own your happiness, and if you won’t start moving it’s the rare and fortunate person who will be driven to “happy” solely by someone else.
You can’t buy happy, and sometimes happy is hard and too-long in the arriving, for sure. Don’t let some someones control all of your happiness. Don’t give away the control of happy.
Take ownership of your own happiness.
I’ll see you (let’s hope) next week…
Posted by bingo at March 27, 2011 6:41 AM
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 8:44 am and is filed under Crossfit, Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 27th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Brother, I hope your intervention will take rook. In my humble as ever opinion, happiness cannot be owned, it’s more like good weather and comes and goes to be relished as appropriate. But unlike the weather, when we throw up our hands and despair that our happiness is prevented by forces outside our control, we make ourselves un-fertile for the experience. I have always assumed this is what Jefferson meant when he wrote about the right to “pursue happiness.” It is the pursuit and the inherent belief therein that happiness is possible, that we can move ourselves closer to it, that makes it possible for us to have the experience.
I was deeply in touch last night with how important it feels to have people to love in my life. It is enriching in every way. I felt happy about that, still do, and lucky.
March 27th, 2011 at 12:46 pm
I meant, “take root.”
March 30th, 2011 at 3:31 pm
I really needed to read your insights about happiness today; it hit the spot!