The Jon Campbell Show

im getting married in less than a month. i am sitting in my empty room. its packed up and my truck is loaded with all my stuff. the people moving into this place are here and laying down some new floor. i cant move into my new place till later tonite. the cleaning people are coming at 6. so i sit here and wait. the internet will be the last thing i pack up. i am really hungry but everything in my fridge pretty much needs dishes or cutlery to eat. i can eat cheese, but it has left a funny taste in my mouth so i dont want any more.

i will miss the size and brightness of this room, and having a garage to park my car in. the new place is nicer, newer, and cleaner. i have too much stuff.

ive gotten myself more organized at work, which means my yard and office are much cleaner and I want to keep it that way, no excuses.

exploring and learning new things is fun. this weekend i drove the big steel box truck for the first time, driving something 30′ long is an adventure. and learning how to use sliding/tilting decks and winches is very cool. i slid a 20′ container off the back of my truck and onto the ground, making it a lot easier to load stuff into. then once all of it was packed into the container i pulled the container back up from the ground onto the truck deck and its strapped down. everything i own is inside that box or in my car. is that my worth?

think about it. our completely amazing bodies and complicated psyche decide for us what is normal. most of the time we do not make a decision that something is normal and it instantly becomes so. i cannot force my mind to believe that sleeping during the day and working all night is normal. my body will not accept that eating only candy all week is normal. normality and regularity are not switches that can be turned and off, they take time.

we come to accept normal through patterns repeated and the passing of seconds, minutes, and weeks. if i showed 4 times a day(I do not) for a year, that would seem pretty normal to me, and I would think those that shower once a week are abnormal. But for someone who has limited water and only can bathe once a month, showering even every day would see very odd. The way we spend monday in North America is a great example of such behaviour. We believe that our overspending, undersaving, get-into-debt-to-buy-crap-we-dont-really-need attitudes are normal, when really they are just a destructive pattern that SEEMS normal. what is normal in my mind may be very different in your head. How we spend our time, our money, what we give to, how we talk, how we physically interact, these things are all governed by the patterns and environment we have invested time into.

so basically my point in all this is encouragement to check your normals every once in a while. has anything unhealthy become normal in your life? do you have habits and lifestyle attitudes that are not beneficial? have you let things get out of hand and repeated them over and over so now they seem less wrong than they once were? on the other hand, have you actively worked at creating positive patterns that will benefit your life and do good? are you helping others? are you doing things to be less selfish? check your normals and avoid the patterns that will destroy you.

some normals for me:
3-5 cd purchases a month
couple pounds of candy a week
doing laundry every two weeks
sleeping 6 hours a nite