SamWatson.us
Lately, a few people have thrown around the phrase toxic positivity in my direction. In my view, we are only on this planet for a short while, and why would you not spend it as content as you can be? To me, when someone I care about (or even in close proximity to) is feeling bad, I take it upon myself to make them feel better.
A few readers of my blog have told me that they learn something from every post. Which is a really huge compliment. It is easy for me to assume that since I have come across something, or maybe read it long ago, everyone else must know it. But it’s true that you don’t know what you don’t know.
In last week’s blog post, I kind of dished on my mom a little. My wife asked if maybe I should have run it by her first before posting to see if it was okay. Which makes total sense! I really felt bad for not doing just that. She then asked me if I asked what my mom had thought about what I wrote and I decided to give her a call.
When I was around nine, I remember being sad my mom was working in the afternoons, and one day she went and bought a new Pontiac Grand Prix. She was so excited. I couldn’t share her feelings. Even at such a young age, there was this thought, “Is this what she is working so hard for? Trading her time that could be spent with my brother and me? For a flashy car?”
Yesterday I was rehired at my old job! Once we came back from Hawai’i, one of the first things I did was go to the office to hang out with my old coworkers and help out where I could. On my return from Greece, it was pretty much the same.
Have you heard the Chinese Proverb about the horses? For years I hadn’t and when I did, fell in love with it. When I mention it, I have found out it is pretty ubiquitous but also many people don’t know it.
Really a lot has happened since my last blog post. But a very quick recap we left the beautiful island of Kaua’i and had many sweet neighbors give us their aloha as we left.
Once we picked the date we would be leaving Hawai’i and going back to Texas, my seemingly infinite time on the island turned into a few months, I felt an overwhelming urge to pack everything I could do into the days that remained to me and not waste a moment. There was so much I wanted to do and so many beaches I still had to see.
Really, I don’t like flying. I accidentally peed my pants once in elementary school and for years could not stand being in confined places where I couldn’t easily access a restroom. Nowadays, this only tends to affect me in that short window of time when you are seated on an airplane until the captain turns off the seat belt sign.
Many fathers are into sports and in turn, push their sons into sports. My grandfather was into airplanes and his son, my father, was led into airplanes. Although he worked on airplanes all his life, I don’t think airplanes were ever one of his passions. Reading and watching science fiction were, which I picked up on my own, and scuba diving, which I was thrust into.