Tag Archives: Time of My Life

21

Excitement

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What gets you excited about life?

We should all be this excited by the prospect each day brings!
We should all be this excited by the prospect each day brings!

No matter what they do, every person has to find things that get him excited about life. They do not have to be complicated or expensive things. They get you going and allow you to feel happy about just living on the face of the Earth every day. 

I would never presume to speak for anyone but myself, but here are the things that I enjoy and make my existence a much more enjoyable experience.

1. Learning and Reading

learningWhen I was a young person, I did not care all that much for learning. It was something that you had to do to get to the next step in life.  This is the wrong way to present education in my mind.  All of us can learn and expand our minds into whichever areas interest us and strike our fancy.

In the past few years, I have learned more than at any time of my life, and it was all done by my desire to expand my mind.

It was not because of what anyone else thought or because I took a class to get a degree.  Learning was taking place because I wanted to be a better person and live a more meaningful life.   Learning gets me excited about living life today and looking forward to the future.

2. People Are Just Awesome

Few things get me more excited about life than the people I have met.  Each person is a unique mixture of personality and intelligence that allows them to contribute to the world in their own unique and powerful way.

Knowing these kinds of people are out there in the world, looking for the best way to live or just making the best of what life has given them, gets me excited about life.  I know that if the good people I have come in contact with are in charge of the world, the future is in good hands.   The people I know get me excited about life.

3. Change Is Always Happening

changeThere is one thing that I am sure of about life, and change will occur no matter what you do. 

Some of the changes you experience are going to flow smoothly, and some are going to rattle your cage a little bit more.

There is only one choice to make though, either you can fight against the inevitable change, which will lead to pain, grief, and sorrow. Or you can choose to roll with the changes that come your way.

I am choosing to ride with the winds of change because they are blowing whether I like it or not.  That is why I have decided to let the life changes excite me about living rather than force me into a depression about what I used to be.  Sometimes the things that change are precious to me, but some seasons come and go, and there are unique and beautiful experiences in those seasons.

Enjoy them while they last because they will change as surely as winter will follow autumn and summer will follow spring.  These changes get me excited about life.  It would be boring if nothing ever changed, ever!

4. The Boston Red Sox and Baseball

awesome red soxBaseball is not for everyone. It is a sport that seems to be moving at a leisurely pace but is not.

A mental aspect to the game should keep you interested and engaged throughout a game or a season.  The Red Sox are a passion for me because they are the team of my family.

The love of this team had tied generations together, and even when there was a hard time finding common ground, we could all state an opinion about the Red Sox.

This love of the Red Sox gets me excited about life because it connects me with the people in my life who I have cared about who is gone. I remember when my grandfather took us to Fenway for the first time.  It was the quintessential ballpark experience.

I walked up the stairs leading to the field, and the area was so green, the uniforms looked so white, and they’re a few feet from me was Dwight Evans, Jim Rice, and Carl Yastremski.   Then I glanced over at the green monster. I was around 9 or 10 years old that day, and any question I had about loving that team was answered on that day.

It is interesting to note about my grandfather. He was born in 1920 and died in 1993, so he never saw them win a world series. I like to think he was feeling the vibe I sent to him in 2004.  He would never have believed it.  I sent a special prayer to him that night because the Red Sox got us both excited about life.

5. Writing from my Inner Thoughts

quotes-about-writing-4Finally, there is the practice that has come to take up so much of my time.  For many years I fought against the urge to express myself in words and to arrange them in only the shortest and simplest patterns.

My prose expressed very little about myself or what I thought or felt.  It is only recently, like the melting ice at the end of winter, that the words have started to flow.

6. Creativity, I believe, is the key to unlocking your unique talents and thoughts.  If you are stuck at anything then, do something creative.  Draw, write, paint, sculpt, knit, spin, whatever you can do to be creative will lead you to the answer you are looking for.  Writing for me is the way I answer the questions that life has thrown at me.

I once worried about the quality of my words and the judgment they might render from others, but I have learned to let that go.  My words are mine. They express what I think, and anyone reading them can like them, hate them or ignore them completely.  That is their prerogative.  I can’t write anything for the sake of pleasing someone else, and it would be a waste of time.

Writing allows my inner thought to have an outer expression, the voice that can’t speak, speaks through the written word, and that is why writing gets me excited about life!

What gets you excited about life?

21

Love Sick

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When you fall in love, you sometimes don’t have control over your senses. You are prone to do unpredictable things and might be susceptible

Love Stinks
So Does the Music

to influences you would never otherwise fall prey to.  Music can creep into your life. Let me rephrase that lousy music can creep into your life at that point and leave an indelible mark on your memory.  One that will never honestly go away no matter what you do.   I heard a song on the radio today, which brought this horrible phenomenon clearly into my thought, Billy Ocean singing his mid-eighties hit, “Suddenly,” and I realized that not only did I know every word, but I was getting a little emotional thinking about it.  Weird, I thought, to hear music from so long ago. Billy Ocean is haunting me.  Something needed to be done. The video of the song Payphone below sums up my thoughts on love songs.

I decided to be proactive, which led to this post.  I am exorcising the demons of all of the silly, stupid, bad, and downright awful songs that have been tied to my memory by “love.”  I thought this would be short but………….

First, those as mentioned earlier Suddenly by Billy Ocean, don’t worry if you watch this. The lyrics are included so that you can sing along as you listen to this song.  I, unfortunately, don’t need that kind of help.

Next up is a song called Cherish by Kool and the Gang.  Very similar sound to Billy Ocean. I must have had it bad actually to have liked listening to this stuff back then.  But here it is, number two of the songs I need to forget.  I often wonder, “what does the heart do?”  Then I realize I will never understand and listen to Kool and the Gang.

The following is so embarrassing I almost left it off the countdown, but if I am honest, it has to be in there.   Listening to Bonnie Tyler’s, Total Eclipse of the Heart, I often wondered why nobody would ever turn around?  Oh, I know because now and then, I fall apart.  I hadn’t heard this song in years, but maybe it is good to listen to………… now and then.

The next two go together because they came from the same movie, “Dirty Dancing,” yes, I saw it, and it has emotional connections to several loves of the past—time to put them all in the rearview mirror.  The first is “Time of My Life,” this video has been viewed 106,208,763 times.  Make that 106,208,764 after you watch it!  Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, thank you, I sympathize.

The other Dirty Dancing song is by the late great Patrick Swayze himself.  She’s Like the Wind.   I am not sure what being like the wind has to do with love, but it must have had something to do with it.  Besides, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

Sometimes a song is just tied to that special someone so tight, you can’t help but think of them whenever you hear it, ten, twenty, or thirty years after that heart -stopping individual has moved on down the road.  Gloria Estefan’s song, I don’t want to lose you now is one of these for me.  I really didn’t know this until I heard it playing in the background one day. Definitely made me think of a certain person at a particular time.  It is a sappy song, but I, of course, can sing along perfectly.

The same can be said for I Can’t Stay Away from You.  My life in the late 80’s was a Gloria Estefan soundtrack I guess.  Sad but true.

As scary as these are, I could go on for at least ten more entries,  I won’t, but I would love to hear what songs haunt other people.

It just goes to show that love stinks, and so does the music!