"Better than I've ever been," He said.

Something wonderful happened to me last week while walking back to my office from lunch. As I made my way down a flight of concrete stairs two guys made their way up. Not that it matters, but this is the last set of stairs I descend before I am reminded that, yes, I work for a living doing a job that is something other than writing and my lunch is a mere minute from being over. Once I get to the big open spot of sun on the sidewalk path ahead, which is just past the part of the walk where all the shadows of the leafs from the trees which line the walkway speckle it a darker shade of gray, I must do my best to open that office door and try to avoid all the A.D.D. moments that will inevitably conclude the rest of my day. (I love my job. I love my job. I love my job. The work is fulfilling... Oh, but it is.)

Sounds uneventful, to walk past two strangers, does it not? What’s more, I can't remember what one of the guys looked like, because he, as it pertains to this blog entry, was just the guy walking next to the guy who inspired this blog entry. But, our blog-entry guy, I will probably always clearly remember what he looked like because he said something wonderful to me and the way he said ‘what’ he said made him that much more memorable.

In case your curiosity is eating away at you, he was tall, about 6'2", handsome, a beautiful dark, dark shade of black, and he was athletic looking (very muscular). He may have even been an athlete. He wore a New York Yankees baseball cap, a white-cotton T-shirt, and a pair of navy-blue gym shorts. He also wore a cast on his foot—maybe it was his leg (that part I do not remember)—and because of this cast he required crutches to get about.

My gaze must have been fixed upon him as I was in my own little world (I was contemplating getting another tattoo, a possibly more public one) and had no idea I was staring at him. Perhaps that is why he engaged me; He didn't know he and his easy smile were just part of my forward glance as my brain said, "Yes. Do it. Get that tiny little tattoo on the inside of your left wrist. You'll be able to hide it with your watch if you are in a professional setting where potentially closed-minded people would be judging you and would, therefore, be less likely to appreciate your intelligence.” (Oh, society... CATCH UP! We are not our bodies, our tattoos, our hair color, our wrinkles, our fat asses, and, as Brad Pitt/Edward Norton's character in Fight Club said, we "...are not our khakis.")

Then, this memorable guy, with my wistful yet purposeful gaze unknowingly fixed upon him, asked me, in his deep, baritone, cheery voice, "How are you feeling?"

How are you feeling? I'd never been asked that as a greeting/question from a stranger before. How are you doing? How are you? How are you today? Yes. But, unless it was from someone I know, and that someone I already know knew that I just got over or just got sick with a cold, or was plagued with something to the being-sick effect, I can honestly say, no, I've not been asked, "How are you feeling?” by a stranger. (Can you imagine, if I got that asked all the time? You'd think I was a walking corpse, or worse. Although I cannot think of what's worse.)

"Great!" I answered over my shoulder, then asked him, "How about you?" as he continued on, climbing up the stairs with his unmemorable friend and with a click-step, click-step of his crutches. "Better" he said, answering me.

My first instinct was: Ah he's just said, "Better," because whatever it is that has him on crutches, with that foot…leg? injury of his, is now better. But, I couldn't help myself, that didn’t seem to be why he said better. I had to know. His "Better," made me curious. “Better than what?" I had to ask him. I had a smile in my question. He knew it, and he answered, "Better than I've ever been."

Then, with him, getting far enough away from me that he was just about within hollering distance, and because I now knew he’d baited me with his, “Better,”I chirped back, "I like it!"

And, “like it” I did!

"Better than I've ever been," he said. That, my friends, is what I call a man living in the Now. He was making his way up a stair case with an injury which required crutches and he's better than he's ever been? It reminded me of how powerful I'd felt after I'd broken my radius, just at my wrist, slipping in the snow, snapping the bone clean in half.

I didn't feel powerful when it had happened, of course not. Breaking my radius had physically hurt like nothing had ever hurt in my life. It hurt so much I refused to cry because I thought my brain would get the message of how much pain I was in if I did cry, and I could not bare any more pain. However, that broken wrist got me to question myself in a way I hadn't before.

I asked me: WTF? You eat great. You don't party hard very often. You run. (Well, as much as a consistently inconsistent person runs.) Yet, you smoke? What are you doing to the only body you get to borrow in this life time? The energy in you may be infinite, but this body, this earthbound form that is on loan while you learn life's lessons; it's not as resilient as you'd like it to be. Remember? The genetics in this body of yours suck. Get with the program, chick.

That’s when I got with the program. Just a month after I broke my wrist, two weeks after I stopped taking the prescribed pain pills, I quite smoking. I had a plan. I was determined. Take the pain pills for 2 weeks, even though the Dr. said to take them for 4-8 weeks, depending. Don't drink any alcohol the entire time you are taking pain pills, because, come on, that's just stupid and probably dangerous (plus, whatever your ailment, you heal slower when you drink alcohol). Allow yourself a couple of glasses a wine here and there, with what will be your last two weeks of smoking. And, get that Alan Carr's "Easy Way to Quite Smoking" book off the bookshelf (that's been colleting dust for 4 years) and read it (duh) then quit. Don't look back.

(Incidentally, I’d recommend the "Easy Way to Quite Smoking" book to anyone you know who truly wants to quit. They may find it monotonously repetitive in the beginning, as I did, but I think the book actually helps to reprogram/hypnotize the reader when they are ready to quit.)

That was that. I quit. After too many years (that I care to admit) of having cigarettes in my life, I was done with them.

But, I can admit that getting through the first year of not smoking was a bit grueling. Smoking was my I'm-fine, just-let-me-just-have-a-cigarette crutch, just like many of us have that let-me-just-throw-back-a-bus-load-of-pasta (or pizza, or liquor, or whatever) so I can eat myself/drink myself (“something” myself) numb and I will be okay mechanism. I am telling you, it felt like I cried every time something bothered me that I would usually smoke away.

This meant that I cried when some a-hole cut me off in traffic. I cried when I knocked something off the kitchen counter while making dinner. I cried, like a child cries, when I was tired. I cried when I wasn’t tired. I cried when I didn't know what my new identity was if I could not be the tough girl who didn't need to cry and who smoked instead of crying. In other words, and in two words: I cried. For a year.

That was tough for me, that year. I’ve never been a really impressive crier type person. True, I cry at sappy things (easily) like good movie endings. I cry those leaky-happy type tears (the watery-eye ones that never make it all the way out to rolling down the cheeks), when I am overjoyed for myself or for others. I even cry every once in a while when my hormones are out of whack. But, still, I am not technically what you’d call a crier when it comes to life’s basic ups and downs. I usually get more angry than teary. In the last 3 months I’ve only cried once and it was over a situation, with my butthead neighbors, that has been building for over two years. (Okay, so I am a build-up crier.) They finally pushed me to the hilt. (One of these blogs I will have to lay it out, why my neighbors are such buttheads. It will be the most boring blog ever, but at least then these worst-neighbors-in-the-world will be stricken from my “About Me” section and it will all be off my chest.)

So, with quitting smoking, the crux of it is that I cried because I couldn't smoke the emotions I'd shoved down for so long. I didn't even know what half of those emotions were. Most of the time, they weren't anything big. I just sort of stopped feeling in a lot of circumstances because I was too busy smoking instead. That’s what I was addicted to (I think intensely), to the not-much-hurts-if-I-smoke-it-away feeling. One gets a mistaken feeling of power when they can figure out how to live without much mental affliction, even if they don’t consciously know that they are turning their feelings off.

Why do you think people do what they do? Eat? Drink? Drug? Etc.?

But, it's more of an incredible thing when you realize that you have been identified with and addicted to something that is robbing you of a lot of your true identity. Coming to this conclusion is why quitting smoking has become one of the most powerful things I have ever done in my life. There are no words to explain how it feels to know that it is within you to give to yourself a more authentic you.

I thought it would be beyond impossible to give up not just something that I used as an unconscious crutch, but also something that was pure hedonistic enjoyment for me. I loved inhaling in on a cigarette and watching the misty grayish-white smoke come swirling out of my mouth. I looked forward to that rush of nicotine hitting my blood and the effect of this washing through me and creating the lightheaded calm that would envelope me. Pure satisfaction and complete control are the two things I felt most during the smoking of every cigarette.

Who would want to give that up? Exactly. But, again, having done it, and knowing I was bigger than the wanting of that experience…

Imagine that power for yourself for whatever holds you back.

But, back to Better-Than-Ever-man, and more to the point. Before Better-Than-Ever-man had said that he was, “Better than I’ve ever been,” I'd just come back from investing 45 minutes of my lunch with reading more from Eckhart (Eck) Tolle's "The Power of Now." In fact, I was absorbing some of the information Eck had offered in his book when I was unknowingly staring at Better-Than-Ever-man. Since a lot of what Eck writes in his books has to do with living in the Now, and the tattoo I want to get has EVERYTHING to do with reminding me to do just that, live in the now, my gaze had become fixed. That’s why it was so wonderful that while thinking about such a thing as the Now, someone living there so fully brought me wonderfully back to the Now.

More fantastic, ‘is’ what he said, the, "Better than I've ever been," part of it. Think about it. As Eck explains—and most of us know this, but cannot or do not practice it—it’s vitally important not to be identified with the pain from one’s past. What a novel concept that is. Right? But, think about how wildly and intensely life changing it would be to not root oneself in a victim identity, to not see one’s self as a product of what has happened, or believe that what will happen is what one should base their happiness or dissatisfaction on.

The fact is, believing in the past, believing in events that have already happened, makes other people, other things (things done and gone with), responsible for who you are, for what you identity is, and, clearly, other people, and those things that have already had their time in the sun are not who we are. As Eck basically says, in more brilliant and smart-guy like fashion, we are who we are Now. Who we will be in the future depends on how rooted we remain in the Now and how conscious we become in the Now.

I started to think about how easy this concept is if you equate it to something simple. For example, becoming more authentically you and living in the Now is like training to become a world-class bicyclist. If you have never ridden a bike before, not ever in your past, that does not matter. That’s the past. But, once you start riding a bike right now, while you may suck at it at first, and fall on your arse a couple of times, because you have not practiced enough to maintain balance more of the time than not, eventually you will be able to remain balanced on the bike.

And, each time you fell off the bike before, had a false start, or someone said you couldn’t do it, that you weren’t good enough to ride a bike, or smart enough, or anything enough, that’s in the past. It’s not now. So, you have to ditch the identity you might be inclined to hold onto, that you are not a good bike rider because someone said so, or because you fell off the bike, or because you don’t believe in yourself any more. That’s not who you are.

You are the person getting back on the bike right Now. You are the person who is getting better and better at riding the bike each time you get back on the bike and continue to practice. Eventually, you are the person winning the race. But, again, as the future is determined by each action in the Now, if you never get back on the bike, if you, instead, identify yourself as the faller-off-er of the bike, or as the person who cannot ride a bike, or as the victim of those who told you that you could not ride the bike, then that past, those things, they become your identity and you are not, therefore, your authentic self living in the Now. You are living in the past and identified with it.

Better-Than-Ever-man, he was not identified with an injury that occurred in the past. He didn’t say, “I’m alright.” He didn’t say, “I’m good, except for this broken wing.” He said, “I’m better than I’ve ever been.” He was like a bird with a broken wing. Have you ever noticed how the bird will keep trying to fly? They forget each second before the next, and attempt, over and over in each new second, each new moment of Now, to fly. They don’t ever doubt that eventually their wings will carry them again and should be carrying them Now. A bird knows its true self. A bird knows it ultimate potential. A bird knows it can fly and that is what it keeps trying to do.

We should strive to be more like Better-Than-Ever-man, to be more like birds. Our true selves can fly. When we are living in the light of our fullest potential, and practicing the embrace of our authentic selves, temporary injuries, circumstantial set backs, they will not define us. We are, when we are living consciously, in each moment that we are in, better than we have ever been!


On a totally unrelated topic, but I had to share because it was kinda cool, today one of my neighbors told me I was hot. He, this neighbor, not one of the buttheads, came to my door to ask me if I minded if he blocked the shared driveway for a bit. When I thanked him for asking, because the buttheads never give me or anyone that respect/courtesy, and he could see that I was visibly annoyed at the buttheads, he said, “You are hot when you are angry. You are hot anyway. I’ve always thought that. But you are really hot when you are angry.”

Ahh. The neighbor thinks I’m hot. Thanks, neighbor. Thanks especially because I have not washed my hair in 2 days, it was up in a schoolmarm bun, and I was sport’n a make-up less face. If only my neighbor was single, attractive to me, and really was the answer to me getting laid. If only. (Don't worry, there is no chance of my neighbor reading my blog.) Guess I’ll have to wait for my man, whoever he may be. (Oh, yeah… Universe? Could you speed it up before my libido tanks?)

That’s great, anyway, yeah? It is not very often that someone thinks and tells you that you are hot. I’ll take it.