Take five to ten minutes off the clock and stare out any window, big, small, thin, thick, or double pane…what do you see? Fast moving cars? Newly leafed trees? Plus there’s plenty of grass fighting to become green while weeds have already reached your knees.
There’s nothing like spring!
Picture yourself on the outside looking in…what do you see? Fight the urge to spin the chair and take in more spring…through recognition, the journey within can be just as beautiful with tulips popping, honeysuckle slithering its scent silently through the air totally catching you off guard and bright red Cardinals chirping at speeds far faster than a Red Bull or hot coffee flowing through your blood stream.
Welcome to the joy of being…
Totally lost? I’m not surprised… Unhappiness or negativity is our planet’s number one disease. It creates more air pollution than any other manmade product and yet we allow it to exist, mainly because we’ve never been properly trained to deflate the elements which have blown up.
Happiness is brought to life through form, content and trapped ego. The thought of protecting our country seems out of tune…if something invades what shapes happiness it’s too easy to become radical.
British author Eckhart Tolle confesses that our new millennium co-dependence is personal happiness. The most unstable thing in the universe is our addiction to locating new things everyday that feeds the rivers leading toward oceans of happiness.
I can’t be the only one who ripped open their Federal Tax forms basking in the thought that our United States government finally created a deduction for our daily dependent!
Locating happiness isn’t that difficult…staying there is like trying to coax a puppy to piddle on a newspaper in the kitchen. The problem with our connection to happiness is its way of constantly changing. According to Tolle, “Any moment, mainly the present, it’s marred by something that’s happened, will happen or it’s deficient because nothing did happen.”
Does this mean we’ve become the abusive generation, turning ourselves into victims of unconscious people? Tolle says no because through it all we still have the power to tell someone, especially ourselves to back off. “You can lead a free of all negative lifestyle.”
It begins with being content with being nobody. Try and share that story with the financial company whose CEO banged out $80,000 for a Persian carpet for his office then calmly said, “What? I didn’t do anything wrong!”
Tolle explains, “What looks like a weakness to the ego is in fact the only true strength.”
Tao Te Ching teaches us, “Instead of being the mountain, be the valley of the universe.” A sense of wholeness is born which allows things to come to you. You might have heard a sermon based on this storyline, learn to sit in the lowest places so the host can walk toward your presence and invite you to sit in a higher place. Therefore, you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
This reminds me of a newspaper article written in the Charlotte Observer in 1988 when the reporter asked me why I didn’t seem excited about possibly taking over Casey Kasum’s position on American Top 40. “To be recognized nationally is an achieved honor and yet you sit almost in silence wanting to shrug it off.” The scene was revisited recently with the arrival of an international award for imaging a piece for the Children’s Miracle Network. Standing in front of Jim and Jen on Lite 102.9 with salt stained contact lenses revealed a side of me not even ten people in my life have ever seen.
From discovering a Mr. Microphone in 1976 to my parents having to hear me lyrically tune up over long song intros scratched into a chunk of vinyl, to hoisting a wild imagination into a production or control room nearly thirty years later hasn’t been a solo journey that deserves recognition…for goodness sakes, my sister’s passionate love affair with Leif Garrett and Shawn Cassidy has a personal piano key named after it.
Multitudes of people, places and things lead to what our egos quickly dub a victory…to win an article of materialistic value is nothing more than showing off…which is why I’ve removed my second degree black belt from my waist while attending martial arts classes. I learn more from a white belt because they’ve got the guts to try something new and inside that process I too can grow.
Same story holds true for the enormous amount of interns that flow through our radio creeks daily. Within their grips they hold what could be the message that links me toward a better commercial and or seven second break over an intro that’s been heard ten billions times before.
If we could stop trying to make an impression or demanding attention…the art of being might in fact reach from the well fertile soils and locate some of that stuff that really counts: true happiness…the kind of stuff credit cards and big hairy burgers with endless amounts of pickles can’t buy.
Guess where that journey begins? The very second you stop offering your opinion.
Gulp!
Steal my art….
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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