Woke up yesterday morning thinking about playing hooky, (an old time word for ditching school) which I first did when I was in 6th grade. Must have been springtime, when I and my best childhood chum, Les Gifford, decided we’d give it a try. Boys will be boys. We loved it.
I don’t remember which of us first came up with the idea, to skip school and ride our bikes out to Buff Lake and spend the day there instead. Whichever of us it was, the other quickly agreed, we being like-minded childhood/ boyhood chums that we were.
In 6th grade you could either take your lunch or buy your lunch. Generally we preferred to buy our lunch, but sometimes– like on days we’d planned to play hooky– we’d pack our lunch. Maybe half a dozen times, at most, during that spring we played hooky. But yesterday, waking up as an old guy– a grandpa with white hair and a grandma by my side — I remembered how I felt as a boy waking up on hooky days. I woke up excited, with an adventure to be had, something out of the ordinary, a little risky, even dangerous, and fun, fun,fun. Spending the day at Buff lake– making a raft and fishing for crawdads and swinging in the trees, wading the stream, no adults around, best buddy in the universe at your side– what could be better? It’s a great day to wake up to.
I’ve been conducting a little experiment of late trying to see if I can move my “happiness set point” up a notch or two. Psychologists suggest we have a “set point’ for our happiness— a set level of how happy we are every day, sort of like how we have a particular temperature in our house that is “set” and if it gets too hot or too cold, either the furnace or the air conditioning comes on. I recently decided I want to move my “set point” up a bit, just to see if I could do it.
I figured a higher happiness set point would be a good thing not only for me but also for those around me, and the planet in general. Happy people, after all, use fewer resources, are more efficient in both their home and work environments and generate fewer costs for the medical system. Lots of good reasons, I knew, for moving up my happiness set point.
One of the personal “metrics” that I had identified for moving up the happiness set point was how I felt in the morning, when I first wake up. I reasoned that if I had a higher happiness set point, I’d wake up more excited about the day, and have something interesting to look forward to during that day– maybe even something fun, fun, fun, or at least fun. And good company with which to share that fun.
So maybe that’s why I woke up yesterday thinking about playing hooky– with the memory of what it felt like when I was a boy, in 6th grade, about to have an adventure. But yesterday, as an old guy, I woke up eady to play hooky from all the seriousness that seems to have been coming down the pike since the election, and especially since the inauguration. I, like everybody, have a ton of work to do in this planetary school we’re attending: mandatory resistance, daily uptightness, homework assignments from all our fellow and sister resistors. Yesterday, I was ready to play hooky. I needed to play hooky.
Which I did. Took a wonderful afternoon hike in the mountains with an old buddy. And I told him about waking up with the feeling, “I’m gonna play hooky today!” As I was telling him about it, I realized I also had the same high-level l “playing hooky” feeling the first time I woke up in Paris. We’d arrived the day before and it had been somewhat of a hassle day, moving into the city from the airport, securing our lodgings, finding first meal etc. It was wonderful, of course, but it had also been at the end of a 12-hour plane ride.
On that first morning waking up in Paris, a very clear, very simple, very light and bright thought popped up: “I’m in Paris!” I had awakened in Paris. This, in itself, was pure ecstasy. If you wake up in Paris, everything else is gravy– whatever happens that day, whatever you do or don’t do, whatever you eat, where you go– all gravy. Just waking up in Paris is a wonderful “life experience”— life’s high-end bon-bon– accomplished. A little bit like the feeling you get when you play hooky in the 6th grade.
Seems to me, developing “hooky consciousness“— or I woke up in Paris consciousness– is a higher evolutionary quest. Sure, regardless of what we do it’s going to be trash day, once a week, and time to pay the mortgage and the electric bill, and the boss needs that report, and the neighbors are fighting again, and the car needs washed and the living room needs vacuumed and the barricades are set up and we need to get to them barricades before the Gendarmes take over the ‘hood. Granted, life continues to be demanding and we need to regularly meet those demands.
My personal bar– however– is to develop a consciousness that allows me to wake as excited as I was when I was in 6th grade and was going to play hooky that day, or as excited as the first day I woke up in Paris. That might be too high of a bar to set. So sue me.
Now, waking up, judging how I feel on a 1-10 point scale, I know what a 10 is. I have my hooky image, my first day in Paris image. If I can come anywhere close, I’m off to a great start.
Now, about setting up sweet dreams, before going to sleep . . .
