Bendy Straws

I get many of my light bulb moments in the shower.  Perhaps the water vibrates the neurons into new connections or perhaps that I am actually truly alone with my thoughts and a loofah full of suds. Distractions are few when the shower curtain is drawn.  Some people sing in the shower. I get inspired.

Remember the Eat, Love, Pray phenom about 10 years ago?  I do. And I Ate, Loved and Meditated my way through a divorce, numerous roommates and one financial crisis after another. Drank a lot too.

A whole lot. Gallons.

Whereas Elizabeth chanted in India, I screamed at my kids in Kentucky.

I dreamed of traveling the world, of spending a year amongst the monks and sexing my way back to happiness. If only…

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Fast forward a few years, possibly a decade.  I am sitting on the patio of my favorite breakfast establishment, Wild Eggs, with my beautiful and spirited 25 year-old daughter, Francesca. We love to go on long walks – escaping into nature for hours of deep, ridiculous conversation. We have chuckled over the discarded plastic bag that we both assumed contained a disembodied head and mused over Harry Potter as well as Mother Theresa’s prayer. We tend to end with swollen feet and blisters along with a tired contentment that comes with a day well spent.  On this particular day, the sun was beaming happy and bright. We were excited about checking out a yet- undiscovered length of greenbelt that had been recently built around our beautiful city. We asked for waters to go. Our Goddess of a server brought us two lidded cups filled with iced, award-winning Louisville tap water and poking out of the top – BENDY straws!  We maneuvered our straws back and forth to listen to the joyful, soft musical clicks escaping coming from the cheap plastic tubes. We giggled like toddlers. We bent them side to side – pulled them long and smashed them short. I commented how being poor was sometimes awesome. It allows us to take pleasure in the small things. We were seriously happy about our toy-like straws.  An idea began to germinate in the back of my brain, a big idea fully bloomed a few weeks later in the shower.

Although I dream of going to Greece this year, I will probably never travel the world. I cannot see myself spending months in devout meditation and servitude. I most certainly won’t have a great romance in an exotic location with a tall, dimpled man-god. For you see, I am a mother to a brood of 8 or so. I have no trust fund, do not possess a valid passport, my income is in the modest 5 digits, and apparently 51 is past the sexual prime expiration date ( a concept I find ridiculous).  But what I CAN find is pure bliss in bendy straws.

My happy can be felt while walking along the pathways of my neighborhood or park, in the way my dogs’ butts wiggle when I come home, in anything that is salted caramel –  and don’t get me started on the pure simple satisfaction of a cold beer chugged during a hot afternoon. My favorite place on earth is my front porch.  My peace can be found in the practice of deadheading my petunias and in the small snippets of meditation I practice sitting not amongst monks, but among the hanging clothes of my walk-in closet. The current love in my life is of the humble and unassuming variety. He is more gravity than fireworks.

So the shower epiphany was this – If we keep looking for happiness outside the day to day life we lead – Have we found lasting happiness, real sukha, or just distraction? What about the ordinary souls like me who have little spending money and even less free time?

After all, Elizabeth Gilbert eventually came home to find true love with her best friend in the city that she left.  Her “happy” was waiting for her when she returned. Personally, I think she has done her best writing since her Eat, Love, Pray era.

Please join me in my search … P.S. I may not leave my backyard.

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