My latest column for Blue Skies Mag is rich with ridiculous metaphor and insight the applies literally to EVERYTHING.
Bold statement, I know.
Check it, team, and as always, hope it helps!
Love!
Blue Skies Magazine, December 2016
Life Coaching Column #79
Issue #84
“Cats With Laser-Beam Eyes”
By Melanie Curtis
I just spent the last 3+ hours of my life putting cats in pictures with my friends.* I can’t stop crying. Crying the sweet sweet tears of such pure hilarity only derived from seeing stupid f*cking cats in pictures of you and your friends where there should be no stupid f*cking cats.
There is little better than a random-ass cat perched on the shoulder of your friend at Lincoln Center before the New York Philharmonic (see pic). Or a cat chillin’ on some random dude in the background of the Delta boarding area shooting laser beams out of it’s eyes and into the forehead of your friend you just bumped into unexpectedly on the way to PIA (see pic). Or the photographic bliss of a very simple fat-ass cat in between your two hot-ass girlfriends on the New York City subway trying to look not hot by puffing up their jackets, fat-ass cat fitting right in between (see pic).
Crying.
I’m crying just writing this. Crying just imagining this utter f*cking nonsense in my mind’s eye.
Once again, per ushe in my column, why, for the love of fat-ass cats real or fake, should you care about this?
I say this all the time, and every time I say it, I mean it… I believe love and hilarity are the two most important things in life. In that order. Love first, hilarity second.
Adding stupid f*cking cats to pictures, I have laughed SO MUCH MORE today than I would have without said stupid f*cking cats. Messaging these pics to my friends, they were able to have that many more laughs in their day too. Blowing up a comment thread with even more laser-beam cat eyes led to even more laughs for even more peeps.
Obviously enjoying more moments of our lives however we find works for us, is excellent. But this column is actually about more than the reminder to embrace hilarity. Which of course is always a good one, I’m just going a different direction, stay with me…
I recently learned about something called the “Inverted U Curve,” which in short shows us the most common relationship between quantity of anything plotted against it’s value or benefit to our lives.
Meaning, when we have too little of something, it’s no good. When we have an amount in the middle range it’s great. And when we have too much, it’s also not awesome. For example, delicious cheesecake… or delicious pizza… or whatever delicious thing you like to consume… can’t have any pizza or cheesecake at all? That’s not cool. Pizza and cheesecake are delicious. Can have pizza and cheesecake? Yay, pizza and cheesecake! Delicious. Power through the entire circumference of a classic New York Style cheesecake and pizza both, and you’re gonna be hurting. Not good.
That’s the Inverted U Curve (see graph).
This phenomenon applies to most things. As much as I’d love for it not to be true, I know that if I kept procrastinating putting stupid cats in pictures via the mental loophole of embracing hilarity (which I fiercely believe in as high value), even that would reach a point where it would tip to bad. The hilarity level would begin to fade, my column still wouldn’t be written, and I’d find myself irresponsible instead of awesome.
The Inverted U Curve can apply to skydiving too. Can’t skydive at all? Noooooooooooo! Can skydive? Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! Skydive too much though and you end up divorced with a banking situation well below zero. Yes, I get how some would look at that as high value, haha, but you see what I’m saying. In the bigger picture, the no bueno part of the Inverted U Curve shows up as burnout and breakdown.
The antidote to touching those not-so-bueno edges … is balance. Might sound boring but in the business of enjoying life optimally and ideally steering ourselves away or around major life mushroom clouds, balance will help us do it.
Put stupid f*cking cats in pictures with your friends. Just don’t do it all the time.
