Confessions of a Cinematic Two-Timer

<If, dear reader, you believe me to be a perfect human being who never does anything inappropriate… please stop reading now.  I don’t want to tarnish your image of me.>

For the rest of you, I have a confession to make.  Yes, at the risk of being picked up by the Cinema Police, I confess that this past weekend my wife and I did something that we’ve not done since we were poor and in college — we double dipped.

It wasn’t planned.  We did it on the spur of the moment, and were ready to give ourselves up at any moment.  Truly!

On Saturday evening we bought tickets to see Doubt.  By the way, a VERY powerful movie… and one that will have you, at the end, debating what actually happened.  More on that in a later post….

Anyway, we exited the theater to hit the restrooms and then, as we headed down the hallway to the exits, we noticed a lot of people entering the theater for Seven Pounds, the new Will Smith release.  Like most of you, I’m sure, we have a limited movie budget — there’s only so much time, and so many dollars we are willing to invest on new releases.  Because we’d rated several other films as “must see” over the holidays, Seven Pounds had been moved to our “see it on video next year” list.

Still, it is Will Smith… and we were a bit curious…. so we said, hey, let’s just pop our heads in and check it out, just to get a feel for it….  (our first mistake…)

We entered the theater just as the previews were starting, and the place was less than half full, so we just took a seat on the side (our second mistake…), fully intending to exit if the place got full.  It never did.  And before we knew it, the movie had started, we were completely sucked in, and BAM, just like that we became cinematic two-timers.

I know, I know… it was wrong.

And we both felt appropriately wicked.

And we did spend a few moments locked in guilt, justifying our actions (“we spent 25 bucks on tickets and popcorn…”).

But I gotta tell, you our net emotional return was… happiness.  Yep.  In the emotional stew of Guilt + desire + curiosity + pleasure, what rose to the top was the pleasure — the short-lived, we’ll-take-it-when-we-can-get-it form of happiness.

Guilty pleasures.

We Gotta Make Our Own Happiness

I got up this morning feeling very unsettled. My week has been busy. I was a bit short on sleep and when my alarm went off all I could feel was bone-tiredness. So I turned off my alarm and skipped my workout (this is a big deal for me — I live in the assessment that I MUST exercise six days a week…).

Even with the catchup sleep, however, I still felt ‘on edge’ once I got up and functioning. I went in to my office to start work, and could not focus or sit still. I kept wandering around inside and outside the house, and eventually found myself out on my deck.

It took a while for me to realize that I’d been standing there — just standing in place — for a couple of minutes, just listening to the wind chimes.

That’s when I noticed that, for the first time in several hours, I felt calm. So, I sat down in a spot of sun on my deck and let go of needing to do anything else.

I sat there for… Oh, I don’t know; maybe ten minutes?

For ten minutes I sat in just that moment. I savored the symphony of wind chimes. I felt the cool breeze on my body. I drifted with the songs of chirping crickets as they waxed and waned. I reveled in the brilliant blue sky, cloudless and crystal clear. I watched two squirrels chasing each other up and down a fence and across the neighbor’s yard. I wondered at the beauty of the shasta daisies, crisply white and yellow against a sea of green, as they bobbed and swayed in the breeze (I even took this picture!)

And I breathed. Just breathed it all in. I sat in the middle of an absolutely spectacular moment on a perfect late summer day and… and nothing. I just sat and enjoyed being fully present.

My tank felt fully recharged after that.

Confession: I experienced a moment of guilt as I gathered my thoughts and came inside to my office. I’ve got so much to do, so many things on my desk. What was I doing?

I wasn’t Doing. I was Being. We gotta make our own happiness. This was one of my moments.

What Happiness and Guilt have in common

At the YMCA this morning two guys sitting at weight machines were having a conversation that went like this:

A: “Why do I do this? I come in here three days a week to beat myself up?”

B: “I agree. This is crazy, to come in here and pull and push and sweat. Why DO we do this?”

A: <after a short pause> “You know what it is? Guilt. If I don’t come in, I feel guilty.”

B: “Yeah, I know what you mean. If I don’t come in, I feel like I let myself down, ‘cuz I know how good I feel on the days I work out.”

A: “Guilt is a pretty good motivator.”

Listening to this exchange, I found myself chuckling. So many people I work with are driven by guilt into beating themselves up for not being perfect, for not “taking care of” everyone in the world, for not meeting impossible standards, and so on… and guilt in those circumstances has become negative and corrosive.

Yet, all guilt is essentially us telling ourselves that we’ve failed to meet some personal standard. So if my standard is that I work out three days a week, and I fail to get my butt out of bed on Monday morning, I feel a little guilt, which serves to motivate me.

Guilt, unchecked, can eat us alive.  Yet if we use it (in small quantities) to hold ourselves accountable when we fail to honor one of our own values or when we renege on a promise we made, guilt keeps us honorable.  And when I keep my promises, I feel happier.

So what guilt and happiness have in common is that they can each, in their own way, serve to motivate us and cause us to shift our behavior.

Thanks, Guilt, for keeping me honest, and supporting my happiness!