It was Jimmy Buffett who said "as long as you're in motion.... life is an experience and it's meant to be lived." I often think of that saying, and a thousand others I've read or heard him sing about, but that one tends to resonate with me a little longer than most.

If you're thinking "why?".... its because I realize I'm not too often "in motion", at least not that kind, not the right kind that he is talking about. I run about my days at a back-breaking pace, and drive with all brakes or all gas (chicago style) and I rush through the grocery store and I rush through the bank and parking lots of my life.... but I stopped looking around and listening years ago. My life has become a blurr of must-do's and need-to-buy's and very little of it encompasses any joy.

What's the point you ask? My point is that you can be fiercely in motion but going absolutely no place.... you can even be going backwards at a break-neck speed, and just because you feel exhausted at the end of the day, you think you have accomplished something.

This brings me to one of my other favorite sayings from my Jimmy.... he once said in an interview... "I'm not a great singer or a great guitar player... but I'm a great Jimmy Buffett!" What a revelation..... to realize that the most important thing you can be is yourself, and be great at it. So few people know who they are, and even fewer actually BE who they really are. My dad once told me when I was not writing much and feeling bad that I wasn't a well known author at the ripe old age of 24..... he said "Hemingway was not a great father or husband.... to be truly great there is a balancing act that you have to master." That made me think about who I was, and more importantly, who did I want to be?

It's an occupational hazard of Americans to be defined by their jobs. All their self-worth and happiness is so commonly wrapped around a business card, a pay check, and a "station" in life. What if your station in life was just to be a good person? What if your station in life was to be a good husband or wife, or parent or sister/brother/ friend.... what if that job that you went to all day long just served its purpose to make sure you could buy food and afford shelter and maybe a few "fun tickets" and rum drinks here and there. What if we all decided that THAT was the new way it was to be? That society was to undergo a great transformation and all priority reverted back to just being a decent human being. What if we were to focus on what the Dahli Llama himself once said to be the "meaning of life".... he said " be happy and be useful". If you approach each new day with just those two tiny goals in mind....you will lead a positive and balanced life.

All too often the way we earn a living and the things that make us happy just aren't in the same hemisphere. If you're one of the lucky ones (Jimmy Buffett for example.....for the extreme example) then you have most of us beat, and be grateful. But its those of us that forget, or better stated, forsake the rest of our lives for those pay checks, no matter how big they are, that are the majority.

I think..... its time to change.

I spent a few years as one of those people... and it made sense to me at the time. But its put me in a position where I am constantly trying to make up for lost years over a weekend. And you just can't do that. My Aunt Muncie once said "half of life is showing up". I wasn't sure I got it as simply stated as it was.... but in the last year of being generally unhappy but not knowing it, and reflecting on my last decade.... she is absolutely right. If you don't get it, as I didn't at first...... take a look at it this way.... at the end of the day, or night, or life..... when you're sitting alone in whatever brief moments of solitude you are able to steal from this chaotic age, what do you think about? Most of you are going to say "work" but let's push that aside... and what do you think about. Its really easy.... you remember things. That's all your brain is, a mosh pit of memories and recollections of times, places, people, and experiences. So... imagine for a moment that you just never showed up to anything that wasn't work.... now what do you have to think about? Grocery stores, gas stations, checking the mail, TV and computers.... but those things aren't life. They are by products of a civilized society that we have to experience from time to time. For those of you thinking.... "so what?" Imagine those quiet moments filled with images of that time John filled Pokey's coat pocket with Corona at O'Shea's on the Vegas Strip after our wedding reception...... or the first time Vegas (dog, not city) went swimming at Muncie & Frank's lake...... or that one time on the sail boat when it was raining the straightest rain I'd ever seen and the lake was like a piece of glass and Dad and I couldn't have been having a better time soaking wet..... or when Christie and Gerald said "I do" and how good the cake was..... or when grandma just made cookies.... or when Uncle Van told that really funny joke that you can't seem to remember, but you remember laughing really hard with your family... What if your mind was filled with those moments? And your job, that "station" in life, just faded out of your mind for that time because it was filled with so many other wonderfully colorful moments with people you love. That is what Muncie means.... and I get it now. I wish everyone did.

The best part about life is that you actually can control it. Not its duration, but its quality. You will always have a job.... but you won't always have a grandparent, or a parent, or that dog, or that husband/wife..... everything leaves someday, maybe you are first, but everything moves on from here and not treating every day and every person you love as if that is the case could just be the greatest travesty of man kind. To take a living thing for granted is a crime against nature, that scars the soul of the one who loves you and just wants to be loved back. It was an argument I had at 23 years old when I was so frustrated with a relationship that I found myself screaming through a face full of tears..."love is an action not an emotion"... needless to say I received a blank stare and almost a chuckle from my opponent at the time. But I still find it to be true. You can say " I love you" until your vocal chords need replacing.... but its what you do to exhibit that that is how you feel that makes it official. And and interesting irony to that, if you manage to do that properly and often enough, you will find that the need to actually say the words all but disappears. Because the other person will know, without a doubt, that they are loved. Sure we all like to hear it... but I will tell you that NOT NEEDING to hear it, is actually a better feeling.

So as I ponder what the next phase of my life will be.... I know that I will show up, and that I will take action, and no matter what means it is that I feed myself and pay for shelter. I will lose some people along the way, those that just don't understand and that can't break out of their "stations" in life.... and I wish them luck. But those that I will fumble through life with, and that will show up for me as I will show up for them.... I have one promise to make out loud, so that you all can help hold me to it when you see I'm off course.... I promise to be happy, I promise to be useful.... and I promise to be who I am, no matter what.