It’s Four O’clock Somewhere

By now we’ve all heard that we should be taking 10,000 steps a day for a happier, healthier life. Devices like the Fitbit make it easy to record your strides through out the day. At the end, if you’ve managed the requisite 10,000 steps, you’ll have logged about 5 miles. Not four miles or six but — five.

While researching this post, the number 5 kept popping up. I couldn’t get away from it. I dare say it might be the most important number ever.

Since I’m out on the “that’s a bold statement limb,” I might as well go a bit further and say, I don’t think you need to take 10,000 steps to live a happier life. I think you need to take five. Five steps.

What in the hell am I talking about? Right… let me explain.

My wife and I just returned from a long weekend away. We drove to a very small and undiscovered beach on Mexico’s Pacific coast. From the outside, it looks as if we live a carefree existence. But we too tend to get bogged down by the daily B.S. that seems to circumnavigate the globe, hustling to make ends meet, to be productive, and to stave off the worries of the future. While we are away in every sense of the word, every now and then, it pays to get farther away.

From a weather-worn Adirondack chair perched a couple meters above the toasty sand, I watched the sun sink behind the cliffs. When it disappeared, I watched the people around me and I noticed few, if any of them, were staring at the palm of their hand. At a device.

Except for the annoying, selfie obsessed couple from who-the-fuck-cares, most were strolling along, lost in thought. Some played with their dogs, while others just sat on the sand, watching the same sun I was watching; staring out at the surf break.

As the condensation from my perfectly-chilled Victoria dripped down my shin, I realized just how much life we miss every day in our distracted lives. I’ve known it for years. We all have. Technology served up the false promise that with it, things would be easier. And we swallowed it — hook, line, and sinker.

Phones with the computing power of spaceships hypnotize us. Our refrigerators will order groceries when it detects we’re running low. God help us if they ever perfect the self-driving car. How far removed from life do we need to be if we can’t stop long enough to drive ourselves.

I’m sorry… I’m out.

It’s become glaringly obvious to me that people love their distractions. They love distractions almost as much as they love their excuses. Having an excuse gives you an out. It gives you a reason to remain just as you are. You don’t have to lift a finger to change because — [insert excuse].

Hell, if you do it correctly, being distracted keeps you from ever having to make the excuse. It’s a perpetual cycle that prevents many of us from noticing the ticking of the clock. I know this, because I made excuses for years. Fed myself Bullshit Flakes for breakfast and created a forcefield fed by the power supply, “I’ll be happy when…”

When we left to go sailing in 2012, I made a promise to myself that I’d stop. I shut down the forcefield and it worked for a while but — like everyone else, I got distracted. I’m now redoubling my efforts to focus on what is and not on what is… ahead.

Just for fun, I googled “How to be happy.” 204,000,000 results. Damn! That’s a lot. I clicked the top result: wikiHow: 3 Ways to Be Happy. There weren’t 3. There were 22 different steps. See the irony?

My friends, there’s no riddle to life. If there was, there would most likely be 3 or… 22 different answers. We hear all the time about the secret to happiness. I’m here to tell you, it’s not a secret. And there aren’t 3, or 22 or 10,000 steps.

From that Adirondack chair I deciphered the Code of the Perpetual Wanderer. Wanna take a guess at how many steps to happiness there are in my code? Exactly — 5. Just five simple steps on the Path of the Perpetual Wanderer (It’s a very short path).

• Simplify. Everything
• Move more — eat less
• Get more sleep
• Get off your fucking phone
• Walk barefoot

The universe has been trying to tell us about 5’s importance all along. We’ve simply been too distracted to notice. How many fingers do we have? 5. Toes? 5. Senses? 5. How many Jackson’s were there? 5. We don’t call it a four o’clock shadow, and everybody knows about the five goldennnn rinnnnggggs!

There are 5 days to a work-week, 5 Great Lakes, 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u), 5 food groups, and 5 boroughs in Manhattan.

Chanel No. 6 would have been a bit over the top, and Jack Nicholson would never have wasted his time on a movie called Two Easy Pieces.

There are the 5 Epochs of Civilization, 5 Pillars of Islam, and 5 Precepts of Buddhism.

I’m not done yet.

Five elements in Western alchemy (earth, air, fire, water, spirit) and 5 in Chinese philosophy (wood, water, fire, earth, metal). There are five stages of grief, five guys named Moe, and when cut horizontally, an apple has five seeds in the shape of a five-pointed star. Go ahead, look it up.

I assure you, deciphering the Code of the Perpetual Wanderer was not an easy task. Countless cervezas gave their lives in the name of discovery. The above 5 tenets have been time-tested and painstakingly pondered over the last decade at least.

Please — be careful with the aforementioned information as it may lead to sudden job-quitting, debtlessness, and a heightened sense of I don’t give a fuck-itis.

Don’t believe me? Care to remain as you are? No problem. Keep doing what you’re doing and I’ll keep enjoying that secluded beach and chilly Victorias.

After all, it’s 4 o’clock somewhere.