Overcoming the “Grass is Always Greener” mentality

I have this terrible problem: I’m always looking for the greener grass. I’m never stopping and staying in the moment- no matter how great things are.

For example: my life is going pretty awesome right now. I have clients, I have really fulfilling work (and a freakin’ amazing creative-director who just thinks I’m the coolest!) I have this coffee shop job that allows me to practice my accents/stories/latte art for a few hours a week. Some cool guy  (for some reason) agreed to go to the Balkans with me this summer. I’m pretty stoked!

But… I can’t help but think that the other shoe is going to drop…. That something bad is going to happen or it’s not always going to be rainbows and kittens.

This isn’t anything new for me. It’s fairly common. I just kinda deal with it. And then when something bad DOES happen, I just shrug and say “see… told ya.” and mope along on my life.

HOWEVER!

I’m sick of that. That’s a crappy way of living life. And I wanted to change.

BUT HOW???

(Story time)

Tonight was Wine tasting 101- where you sit and talk about all sorts of wine. It’s for work- so I get paid to do this. (Terrible… I know). I learned more about wine here than I ever did in Napa, parts of France, Italy, Stellenbosch and wherever else I’ve been that has “grown wine”. (ex: grape vines are basically weeds and 95% of them are UNDER GROUND! That means that you can totally taste the soil (layers) that they grow in! That’s kinda cool. I wonder if you can taste war…. We’ll find out!)

You’ll be surprised to find out that I’m not really a wine-person. (I’m whiney… but I don’t particularly like to consume wine). I’m pretty good at gagging through the stuff to get drunk (that’s all I did when I was living in Australia, for example), but actually APPRECIATING wine? Nah. Not really my thing- but this training is force-teaching me otherwise.

Example:

APPEARANCE: “Really admire the color/pigment…. What hues are present? What tinge is present? What does it remind you of? Swirl the wine… What rorschach designs show up?”

AROMA: “take a huge ass whiff… what do you smell?” (for me, it was either “hockey players” or “acetone”…. very rarely is it anything else when it comes to wine, sadly.) Apparently I’m missing all the “fruit” and “flower” and “cut grass” smells. I didn’t smell anything of the sort. I smell acetone mixed with dirty hockey player jock-strap 99.4% of the time.

TASTE: (because you want to taste dirty hockey-player-jockstrap….)— Actually, this is where it always hit me in a weird place. Normally when you smell nail-polish-remover, you don’t think “HEY! I SHOULD DRINK THAT!” (except in the case of Durian, which you should ALWAYS eat durian… because it’s effin’ delicious.) But when I actually taste the wine- it doesn’t taste ANYTHING like what it smells like. Fruits, nuts, wood, spices…. Bold, pow, pizzaz. All sorts of new things hit my pallet. FUN!

oh… but then the aftertaste…

AFTERTASTE: almost always sour. Acidic. bitter. Shitty. Kinda like you’re drinking Goon– except this is supposed to be “fancy wine” and not the cheapest box wine in Oz- but the memory made me want to keep drinking!

—–

They did something similar to this at the Ashram in India– where they held food in their finger-pads and stared at it. Then smelled it. then crinkled it and listened… then tasted. then made a paste with saliva and tried to figure out all the tastes/flavors/textures/etc.

It was an exercise in being present-or aware.

Ok- here’s my point/hope: If I’m more present, I won’t want to look for the greener grass. If I’m more present, I’ll appreciate what is right in front of me. If I’m more present/aware, I’ll at least have a basis on why I’m happy or not- as opposed to “my gut says so”.

I’m going to spend this week “being present”. My life, right now, is a big heaping place of awesome with radsauce on top! So I’m going to relish in that.

If you have any tips on this- please share!