Breathe Deep & Remember Rule Number Nine

Remember how excited many of us were for March to arrive?  We even endured an additional, unnecessary day of February this year.  We earned March!  

But not this March, right?  

Margaret and I went grocery-shopping yesterday.  Behind the masks of our fellow shoppers, there were a lot of anxious eyes.  Anxiety is understandable.  These are trying times indeed.  In significant part, anxiety is a by-product of all of the uncertainty with which we live these days.  No one knows how much worse things are going to get before they begin to get better, how long it shall take to get to better days, or what those better days shall look like when they arrive. 

All of those points are inarguable.  You cannot allow them to rule your life.  Not if you want to continue to live and to not simply exist. 

I am painfully aware just how many people did not purchase a copy of Pop Pop Rules.  Your anxiety-ridden faces give you away.  No matter.  A piece of free, unsolicited advice:  Breathe deep and remember Rule Number Nine...

...and remember, also, to be careful out there. 

-AK

Rule Number Nine

WIN TODAY.

As you may have detected by now – and I am confident that you have – being that you are a genius, many of Pop Pop’s Rules connect with one another.  That is by deliberate design.  Life is a journey, not a destination.  The proper tools are necessary to ensure that your journey is as stress-free as possible. 

People defeat themselves in life as often, if not more often, than outside circumstances do.  They do so – in no small part – because they fail to appreciate the difference between Fear (Rule Number Six) and Panic (Rule Number Seven).  Worse still, they treat the two concepts as if they are identical and, therefore, interchangeable.  It is a common mistake – at least as common as the one many people make with Eagerness and Anxiety. 

But I digress.

Fear can be a beautiful and inspirational thing.  It fuels you.  It drives you.  It hones your commitment to the task at hand.  You want to know a good, short cheat test for whether you love the most important people in your life:  Ask yourself if it scares you - even for an eye-blink - to envision your life without them in it.  See, this is not calculus.  If it was, Pop Pop could not do it.  This stuff, unlike calculus, is easy.  Also, unlike calculus, you will actually use this stuff in your day-to-day.  

Panic, on the other hand, is an unhealthy thing.  It is an emotion that can kill you - and will if you let it.  It deprives you of your ability to think clearly and cogently.  More importantly, it turns off the logic and common sense part of your brain, which (whether you realize it or not) you likely rely upon countless times every day. It reduces you to a stimulus/response approach to life, for which you are ill-suited.  Worst of all, you stop acting and start reacting.  As your panic level ratchets up, and a solution to your problem seems to be disappearing along the horizon line, you realize you are no longer standing where you once were.  You are now in quicksand.  The more you struggle, the faster you sink.  

Best way to avoid such a nightmare scenario?  Remove panic from your day-to-day.  To steal a line from the great John Lennon, "It's easy if you try."  

Here’s the thing.  Life is broken up into readily-digestible single-serve pieces.  I do not know who decided upon the concept of the "DAY" or determined that its length would be "24 HOURS".  I do not know who decided upon the recipe for Clams Oreganato at Uncle Vinnie's in Raritan either.  So what?  I know that they taste incredible.  A friendly tip from Pop Pop, your favorite curmudgeon:  You do not have to go through life trying to find the meaning of every damn thing.  Whoever it is who fashioned the day as life's primary unit of measurement completed the task before I got here and well before you got here.  I need to know nothing else on the subject. Neither do you.

As it turns out, a day is the ideal unit of measurement for life.  For while there are days that feel as if they last forever and there are days that feel as if they race past us at an almost-incomprehensible speed, the fact of the matter is that each essentially mirrors the one that came before it and the one that shall come immediately after it in terms of its length.  That, as it turns out, is a critically important feature. 

Generally speaking, none of us knows precisely when our life will end.  It is something akin to hopping onto the bumper cars ride at Jenkinson's.  The ride lasts for as long as the youngster working it permits electricity to travel to the antennae on the cars.  "Switch on" and a-bumping we go.  "Switch off" and no more bumpity bump for my baby and me.   

When you ride the bumper cars, you can either spend the ride fretting over how long it shall last or you can spend it mercilessly terrorizing the ten-year-old kids to whom you were talking trash while all of you were waiting in line for your turn.  Irrespective of your approach, at some point the ride ends. 

You have every right to go through life worrying yourself to the point of panic about the countless things in our day-to-day over which none of us has a smidgen of control.  Or, you can apply what I refer to as the "shampoo principle", although the operative concept is not "rinse and repeat" but rather "compete and repeat".  Simply put, you focus all your attention and all your energy on one thing:  WIN TODAY.  At day's end, you do whatever you have to do to muster the strength and the resolve to repeat the process the next day. That is it.  Nothing more.  

Here's the damn thing about it, you cannot solve tomorrow's problems, known or unknown, today.  You see, today, you have today's problems and travails with which to concern yourself.  That is more than enough for anyone.  Trust me.  

The enormity of any task becomes more manageable when broken down into smaller increments.  While I am not particularly fleet of foot, at some point in my early to mid-40’s, Pop Pop took up the hobby of running in marathons.  As I write this, I have completed nine marathons, including two each in 2015, 2016, and 2017.  Running a marathon, and even more so for me, training for a marathon, is a massive undertaking.  To complete the task, which is after all the goal once you have signed up for the race, I do not think about having to run 26.2 miles.  I simply think about running a mile.  Once I have completed that task, I repeat it. I continue to repeat it until I have run out of miles that I need to run. Again, this is not calculus.  This is easy stuff.  Believe me.  I could not do it if it was not. 

#WINTODAY.  Do that, and nothing more, and you have achieved as much in one day as anyone ever has and as much as anyone ever will.  Then, get up tomorrow and do it again.  Do it until - well - do it until the kid flips the "OFF" switch and your bumper car moves no more.  At that point for you, as it will for us all, the Boardwalk life will be through.  

Until then, give 'em hell...

...after all, your ticket is already paid for, right?