My Thoughts on Contentment… Lately
Maine is this sweet mix of old folks in 40-year-old flannels and Gen-Z-ers in vintage t-shirts. It’s millennials from California who are hobby gardening and gruff men who work themselves to the bone in the trades.
As I sit here in Village Donut & Coffee Shop in Raymond, an elderly woman taps her white plastic spoon insistently as though it’s the rattling off of her thoughts. She and her husband sit across from one another, inviting another elderly man to sit with them. They aren’t looking at each other; they’re comfortable. Used to one another.
I opted for Raymond today because I needed somewhere comfortable to rest and work. Close. Kindred. Like I could walk out the door and walk down the road to our camp on Sebago Lake. Portland is usually my jam: The gorgeous croissants and perfect lattes. Something so simple made with such articulation and care. So beautiful. Portland baked goods, my favorite being from Tandem, take my taste buds on a journey of creativity and dreams.
But yes, I opted for Raymond today. I have done a lot of dreaming lately, so I thought Raymond, a comfy place to let them come forth from my synapses and the depths of my subconscious to my fingertips and into my keyboard and here, as you read, would be a soft place to land.
The old lady continues to tap the spoon. Now she is singing “la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la…..” I kid you not. That many “la’s”. I think of Bob Marley now. Mine and my husband’s favorite comedian. A Maine local. He speaks of the aging Mainers, with their accents and their habits. His jokes are a bit off-color… My thoughts trail….
What’s in the human mind? It’s a powerful tool. The old couple strolls away, leaving the old man behind alone.
I last visited my grandmother at her old folks home this past weekend. She’s 90 now. Yia Ya. She sings a lot, too. She worries, she is proud of her family. She talks of Jesus so much and with such fondness. She is Greek. If you’ve seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, all of the movie speaks truth to the Greek way of life.
Anyways, Yia Ya, once she calmed down about germs and my children, we settled in the garden area and sang and danced together as I played “Eye In The Sky” by The Alan Parsons Project. We sang songs about Jesus to each other. One of her originals, which is my favorite, and I sang one by Hope Darst. But the mind is such a fascinating thing.
Fear, hope, emotion, logic and habits all reside in and originate from here. Recently, I’ve been learning a lot from my marketing mentor, Russell Brunson. He speaks to the emotional monkeys, in the frontal cortex of our brain. It’s here we make decisions based on emotion and reason… “That sounds fun, I don’t want to miss out…” “I don’t have enough money for that…”.... But the subconscious, the big elephant that makes up the majority of our brains is what ultimately guides everything we do.
It’s how we think when we just sit in a coffee shop looking out the window with an old lady tapping her spoon on the table.
Around me, the other older Mainers speak of Nancy Pelosi and broken vertebrae. I wonder if I’d hear such conversations at Tandem, or the Coffee by Design on Diamond Street in Portland.
The mind goes as you age, I guess. Eventually it all starts to go. In this stage of raising our babies, my husband and I do most everything for them. Yes, our first boy is becoming more independent; sad, but good. But eventually, we all end up back in diapers? What a spectacle. What a concept.
I’m comfy here in Raymond, listening to the older ladies laugh their tired, wise laughs and the older men saying “there ya go” in their deep, worn voices.
Surrounded by the older gents and ladies reminds me that they were once younger, a little less wise. They’ve lived life, and look they’re still here. They’re tapping their spoons and talking politics and are still here.
In this digital age, the influencers and 19-year-old millionaires on Instagram and travelling millennials, we all want this in the end, don’t we? To sit at a coffee shop with wisdom and contentment and just eat a cinnamon twist and drink our Green Mountain coffee. And not strive for another darned thing.
One day, our minds will go too, and with them, so will our bodies. I wonder if we can find contentment in our Raymonds until then, at least every so often.
With Love,
