My wife and I returned from Ft Lauderdale Saturday. We were there for a corporate event where I was giving a speech. My client generously offered an extra couple of nights in the host hotel and our room was on the 26th floor overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I watched the sun rise each morning as I sipped coffee and read. It began as a faint glow on the horizon to a disk coming out of the water. It was nice. My wife and I haven’t had a chance to do things like that recently. Now that the kids are older, we’re trying to take advantage of them. As we left to go on our trip, we told our kids to please not let us find the house in ashes when we returned. We felt that was reasonable, and it was in pretty good shape when we got home Saturday.
South Florida is quite different from South Alabama or, I suspect, most of Alabama, and I guess saying that is simply acknowledging the obvious. I counted five or six different Ferraris which I rarely see around here. I think they’re beautiful. There were lots of Bentleys. There was lots of jewelry on everyone, lots of senior citizens on the boardwalk late in the afternoon walking together, riding bikes, sitting and visiting, lots of accents, lots of people speaking Spanish, and what I think was Russian. Guitar players up and down the boardwalk, busking and playing music they hoped would catch the senior’s attention.
My hope for my wife and my trip was to create, not a bucket list for the two of us, but a reverse bucket list. Not a list the things we wanted or wanted to do. I wanted us to create a list of the things we could do away with, what we could do to simplify. I’ve said it many times to my wife and kids – we could probably get rid of half of the things we’ve accumulated over the nearly twenty years in this house and never miss them. If you’ve lived in the same place for a while, you can probably relate. How and why did we get this stuff in the first place, and why do I have such a hard time getting rid of it?
I look at all those things those people in South Florida had, especially the beautiful cars, the jewelry, the magnificent beachfront homes and thought “Wow! That’s beautiful. I’m glad I don’t want it,” and that’s a 180-degree shift from the way I once was. I wanted the stuff, the houses and the cars. Today, what excites me is getting rid of the stuff I have, and my wife is kind of there, too. It’s a part of our journey together, of what we want for ourselves from here on out and what we want will change, likely, many times.
Ironically, though, as I say this, my wife and kids have asked for my Christmas list, more things I want, which includes, partly to my shame, a top hat. Do I need a top hat? No. Do I want a top hat? Yes. In a few years, will I wonder why I have it and why I struggle to give it away? Absolutely.
I think maybe I’ve identified the problem.
I’m Cam Marston, and I’m just trying to Keep It Real.
