Happy Birthday!
To me.
I turned 61 last Friday. I’m not thrilled.
I’m glad to be alive, mostly. I’m pretty healthy. I have a lot going on in my life it seems. So, I ask myself, why am I not thrilled?
Because I can't settle my mind about certain things that I should’ve let go of long ago. Why? I have a feeling it's just part of my engine and I’m not sure how the engine will run if I take out those parts. Or if I even can at this point.
Resentment, self-judgement, fear, insecurity. They are actually a menu of the three prime movers of almost any ism. I mean, I am highly aware of all of them. They don’t run my life. Most of them don’t have too much real juice in my mind but they are still reflexes I have to deal with almost daily and in many ways. They just gnaw at me as opposed to running my life, I think.
It’s odd, but when you have issues that gnaw at you, but don’t consume you because you are aware of them every time they come up, you have to engage with them and disarm them. That is the daily battle. When you are victorious it feels pretty amazing. I guess I do envy people that don’t really have to fight that fight most of the time but I think by fighting it out I get some of my best thinking and inspiration done. Because they are fundamental parts of my thinking. And the roots of my empathy to some degree.
Every day is full of exciting revelations when you take almost everything personally, project a lot and imagine the worst outcome of most situations.
The truth is, most of them are kind of tired and the beautiful thing about getting older is you really start running out of fucks to give just from experience and wisdom. The wisdom that comes from giving way too many fucks and realizing most of them are a total waste of fucks and fucking time is priceless.
Hard earned fucking lessons.
It does seem that I am missing out on some of the good part of the whole being alive experience, but some room is created from all the space that was being taken up by all the fucks I was giving and I'm getting some real peace. Zero fucks equals peace of mind. As long as the fucks you are giving up are non-essential fucks. It’s important to keep essential fucks in place. Principles.
Some of those principles can be rooted in fear and resentment but why judge that part if the principles are solid. Most of the principles come out of some kind of empathy for the truly unique people of the world.
When your brain is spinning all the time just trying to find a place to land in the chaos of your life and the world, and that's a problem to be solved all the time, you're at least 90 percent more interesting than well-grounded, confident people.
That’s what I think today. I’ll question it as soon as I finish writing this.
Today I talk to the very funny Kaitlin Olson. On Thursday I talk to the very professional Connie Chung. Good talks.
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron
