Wellness Luxury: Feeling Good For Doing Good Again

To do good you don’t have to feel good. If you do it’s a wellness luxury, an expression I just made up. Google wellness luxury. This isn’t that sort of post.

 

Take mental health for example. Nothing makes any difference to you? No one cares about you? Feeling earful about the future? Feeling sad or depressed?

 

That’s the mental part of mental health. Walk around with that mindset and you can consider yourself mental to whatever degree you come up with. Or get a professional review.

 

I learned that something always makes a difference; someone always cares about you. Always. That you can’t see it isn’t anyone’s problem. Just yours. And it’s not a problem until you make it a problem. So let’s make it a problem.

Caring About People Is A Wellness Luxury

 

If you wonder who cares about you, try flipping the question to who you care about. Well, who do you care about?

Is it a friend, former neighbor, family member? Go ahead and shuffle the deck until you find someone. Feel free to reject them because you just know they don’t give a hoot about you.

 

That’s not what this exercise is about. They don’t care about you, and that matters because…? Because you care. Sometimes caring is a curse, a burden to bear, buts it what makes us more human. And more fun.

 

Doing things and going places without the people you care about is their loss. You’ll still have fun, you keep telling yourself. Psssssst, you won’t. I know I don’t, but I still go.

 

We don’t have to care about someone because they care about us. Sharing the same lifetime, our common era, is enough. Do good for someone and let it ride with no expectations.

 

If someone does the same back to you, call it karma, a good deed, good luck. Just keep it rolling.

 

I care about lots of people, some living, some not. Do they care about me? Did they care? Will they ever? That’s their problem, not mine. And not yours. That’s how caring works. We don’t care just to make someone care back, then get hurt when they don’t. Waaaaaaa, is the right thing to do here.

 

If someone doesn’t show their good feelings about you, or at least match your feelings about them, why not just feel grateful to be able to care at all? Instead of judging shallow, self-centered, family-ignoring careerists, give them a break.

Others make it seem so easy.

 

Caring About Places Is A Wellness Luxury

 

I’m in Oregon looking at falling ash and an orange sun cloaked in forest fire smoke.

 

We’ve got fires going in places it would take a lightning strike to start, but they were started by human frailty instead. The story is a teen aged kid tossed a smoke bomb off a cliff and started a fire that’s burning over thirty thousand acres. 30K acres. Too much.

 

A house on a third of an acre looks big. I can’t imagine 30,000, especially on fire. But we’ve got the smoke and images to prove it. The state’s on fire and the caring pours out.

 

Closer to home, we care about where we live more than where we live cares about us.

 

Take Tigard for example. When I moved here I noticed the population number on the ‘Welcome To Tigard’ sign didn’t reflect this new arrival.

 

Did it bother me? For about two seconds, then not. I still like Tigard. Raised the family here, still live here. Not. Bitter. About. No. Tigard. Love. At. All.

 

At least it’s not Portland? Put Portland on a Tigard address instead of Tigard and it goes to Tigard. When I lived in Portland, Tigard looked like the end of the world. Multnomah Village was even too far away, and Tigard is further.

 

I told that surburb horror story story to a man from Hillsboro and he said they still think of Tigard as the end of the world. Funny guy, right? In the same vein I told him that’s how Tigard thinks of Tualatin and Sherwood. He didn’t laugh, probably because he wishes he lived in Tualatin or Sherwood instead of-end-of-the-line-Hillsboro?

 

Wellness luxury leaves room to talk smack about places instead of people. People are more important. They make the place where a wellness luxury thrives. And they get their feelings hurt easier than your butt driving on a Washington County road. The locals call it butt hurt.

 

Are we thriving yet?