Those memories of serious air conditioning shortly after we moved to the Orlando area brought back a lot of feelings. What's interesting is that so many of those feelings were positive. I genuinely felt content and on an excellent trajectory. In recent years, mostly since the pandemic, I feel like contentment is intermittent at best, and anxiety is pretty much always high. For that reason, I feel like it might be useful to look back at that time and identify the things that made it better. Granted, people tend to look back fondly at certain times in a way that is more positive than it usually was. That said, I'm not big on nostalgia, and I don't view many periods of my life as exceedingly positive, so I think my memory is legit.
The first thing is obviously the excitement of all of the newness. I felt this a little in moving to Seattle, but it was muted I think because of the sheer volume of change. In that case I was moving away from Ohio after 36 years, navigating a new place, just got married, starting a new job, baby on the way, houses that couldn't sell, and it was a lot. Coming to Orlando from Ohio, I felt kind of done with the Cleveland area, wanting something new. Professionally, I had been wandering around much of the first half of the year, with a contract job, a false start, and relief that I got out of health insurance. All at once, and in just a few weeks, I landed a contract job at SeaWorld corporate, sold the house almost immediately, and secured a new place to live while building yet another. It was high stress for a couple of those weeks, but then everything was on autopilot and routine. It was radical change that came and settled quickly.
I was optimistic about the contract at SeaWorld, but also not married to it. Nothing was given about it, but after the prior few months of being unsure about what was next, it didn't even matter. I was very Zen about career, and the opportunities were so numerous that I could pick and choose. Even with Simon being 3 by that time, I felt like my most important outcome was to make sure that he and Diana were comfortable and getting everything they needed, and that box felt very checked and prioritized over work.
Parenting was just not very complicated. While we would get Simon's ASD diagnosis in that first year, there was no panic or serious worry. The biggest problem that I had with him was his unique ability to headbutt or otherwise hit me in the nuts (something that continued for the next three years). It's not that he never misbehaved, but he was happy to see me when I got home from work, and we were making all of these amazing memories, for me and Diana at least, at Walt Disney World.
Despite not being used to the heat of summer, I forced myself to go walking, a lot, with the acquisition of my first FitBit. I listened to tunes and just walked whenever I could. I got down to a weight almost matching my 2005 coaching days, and I felt great. I suspect that this had a lot to do with my contentment.
And yeah, there was a particularly great stretch of music around then. Our 2013 and 2014 playlists were pretty great. Alt rock and pop was having a moment, and it was pretty great. To this day, we listen to those playlists quite a bit, and they're the longest we've ever had.
Oh, and the world did not feel like it was on fire. An actual adult ran the country, racism and the various phobias were being relegated to the fringe of society and we were coming hot and fast out of the recession. There was a lot of reason for optimism.
So what do I do with all of that? If it's the circumstances that made it awesome, most of those are things that I can't reproduce. Simon will not be younger, we don't want to move, I'm in the longest job I've ever had and don't want to change. Obviously I can up my physical activity, but it's so hard for me because I kind of hate doing it. (And fuck you to the fitness people who think that's a personality flaw... You don't get extra points because you do something that you like to do.) All of our circumstances are different, and we're in a different stage of life. The question really is, how do I optimize this stage for contentment? To answer that, partly I need to define what I want it to look like. I can't stop being a parent though, and I have to responsibly game out the rest of life, which means wealth building so we don't have to work a "career job" indefinitely. This is especially true if these idiots in Washington tank Social Security. Those two areas already require more discipline than I think I have.
I can't recreate that year, obviously, but I'm trying to lean into the things that feel good now. It doesn't seem like that should be so hard, but it is.
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