Matt Wahl, Sunshine State Of Mind from mattwahl on Vimeo.

(To play the video, click on the play button in the lower left hand corner of the video box. Also, I’d love to hear what you think! You can leave comments below.)

Keeping a Sunshine State Of Mind is one of the keys to living on the Fun Side of Life. It’s great to set goals and to look forward to achieving something but please trust me when I say that there is no way to have fun and be perpetually striving for the next thing. I have tried to live that way for years and it doesn’t work!

I did take a few years off. When I was in college I spent a bit of time with no real concrete goals. I had my classes and my jobs, my friends, trips, parties, etc. but I was able to live very much in the moment. I had the goal of graduating in 4 years but that didn’t run my life. I knew if I signed up for enough classes each quarter (the University of Minnesota was on the quarter system when I was there) I’d reach my goal.

Looking back, I find it ironic that when I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, I lost the ability to live in the present moment. It was when I decided and declared to the world that I wanted to be a musician, I began to postpone my joy. I remember it quite vividly. I was a theatre major. I was working two jobs and involved in plays, set design and tons of other things that were required for my degree. I was getting to my first on-campus job at 7am and often not returning home until midnight! I had no time to work on my music. It dawned on me that if I could graduate and get a normal day job, I would be gone from maybe 8am to 5pm and have my nights and weekends free.

Bam! There went my joy! I rushed through my last 2 years of school. I did what I had to do but I didn’t enjoy myself. I just wanted out! I got out in 4 years and I got my day job. It didn’t take me long to be dissatisfied. I wanted out of that too! I wanted to play music full time! I set that as my next goal and looked ahead at that goal for 3 years, all the while postponing my joy.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy any aspect of my life. That’s not true, nor is that my point. For me, the postponement of joy is an underlying state of being. It permeates all aspects of my life. I can experience joy in a given moment but my overall way of living has some separation to it. It’s like I’m not connected to myself. I know that sound weird but it’s the best way I can describe it. My body is here in the present but my mind is off somewhere else.

After a while it becomes a “natural” way of life, a habit. After I had quit my day job and had reached my goal of playing music full time, I still wasn’t happy. I wanted to play bigger and better shows. And I’d also come up with other non-music reasons to postpone my joy. We had bought an old house in our home town of Eau Claire and all the restoration gave me tons of reasons to delay feeling good. “When the floors are done…” “When the kitchen is finished…” Pretty soon you forget how to enjoy yourself!

Life just is. As I mentioned in the blog on The Answer is Faith, judging each moment doesn’t do us any good nor does it do any good to decide that you won’t feel good now but will in the future when X, Y and Z happen. Keeping a Sunshine State of Mind and bringing that sunny day attitude to everything you do will help no matter what. If you are in the middle of something that doesn’t seem too great, remember, you are where you are and you get to choose how to feel about it!

Thanks for being here!
Matt

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