April Come She Will

That last time April 1 fell on a Friday, the Cheap Beer of the Month Club was still a thing that I did. My beer reviews went up on the first Friday of the month...or at least in theory. Most of the time I was late.

When I didn't post anything on April Fools' Day 2011, my friend Megan called and told me I 'd missed a perfect opportunity to have a fake-out Cheap Beer of the Month. "It'll be years before April Fools' is on Friday again!" she (rightfully) chastised. Turns out, the number of years was five, and I have once again not come through. Megan, I am sorry for failing you twice. :( (Here's to a great post in 2022!)

That has nothing to do with the rest of this entry.

So I made it through March.

The first half of it I was down on myself a lot, but on March 15, I wrote in my daily journal that the whole day was pretty damn good "for no particular reason," and then I had sixteen more of those days in a row. Was this all in my head? OF COURSE. EVERYTHING IS ALL IN OUR HEADS. That's not the point (or, it kinda is, but it's not the point I'm making in this paragraph). The point is that I made an arbitrary decision to look at things differently, and in two weeks' time things looked different. Two weeks is a pretty small investment when you look at the big picture, especially when that investment was me just sitting around chilling the fuck down.

Your author last month.

I mean, seriously. Two weeks. And look at me now! I'm a damned Zen master! How easy was that?!

Alright, so it wasn't that easy, and even at that, it was entirely too easy. First of all, take it from a weeks-old amateur guru - in the quest for inner peace, as soon as you think you've found the answer, the question changes. And second, we're not wired to be happy all the time; we're wired to think we want to be happy all the time. I'm grateful for my sixteen-day streak, but I know it'll end at some point. Like the professor in the meditation series pointed out, if you're going to live in the world, it's kind of impossible not to be influenced by it.

And now, abruptly, it's April.

Image source.