March 18th, 2024 / µ

Don’t Forget the Good Times

Life can be a rotten deal sometimes, but that does not mean everything in your life has been bad, even if it feels like that when you are neck-deep in a situation that seems only to be getting worse by the minute.

When my dog died – may he find all the chicken & treats he can eat in doggy heaven – I lost my last friend and soulmate in Denmark. That left a gigantic void, and I will always hate the Danish police for granting a group of psychopaths carte blanche to crush the last years of his life, crush the perfect settings I had found for his senior years – an apartment in his home-town Paris, with a little courtyard and close to his favorite parks. I will hate them forever for that, as I hate them for letting the same group of psychopaths pester the last two years of my dad’s life.

Reboot to Happiness 2.0

When life is like that, one of the remedies to stay happy can be the psychological trick of an emotional and visual return to happy moments. It is the same as when you fix your computer by returning to the last point where it worked. You know, before that outrageously annoying Windows update screwed up the rest of the hard drive.

Life, the way I see it, is basically a long line of events: good, bad, great, horrible, beautiful, traumatizing, unique, and so on; if you visualize your life as this long line of events, you can find and focus on the points in time, like dots on the line, where you were genuinely happy and pick one to reboot from emotionally.

To do this, ask yourself: When was I truly happy, and why? The when is not so important. But the why will be your source of renewed energy. The why tells you what you should focus on to be happy.

To illustrate, I will resort to childhood memories. Don’t worry; I won’t eat a cookie and go on for 3000 pages!

Indiana

My two summers in Indiana in the 1980s will always be some of my happiest memories, also because these summers were very different from my life in Denmark, which included a private school I didn’t like, being socially shunned where I lived because I went to that private school, and like most middle and upper-middle-class kids in the 1980s with two workaholic parents who also traveled quite a lot, mostly left to my own devices.

Summers in the States were life, people, BBQ-get-togethers, pools (so many pools), and things you couldn’t get in Denmark at the time – little ordinary things such as seriously girly magazines for pre-teens and teens; Sweet Valley High paperbacks; huge malls; themed amusement parks, and cartoons on TV in the mornings.

In the 1980s, life in Denmark was boring for kids compared to life in the States. And I am not even comparing Denmark to big cities like Chicago, Houston, and New York; that wouldn’t be fair. I am comparing small to small.

The two summers my dad worked at Notre Dame and Purdue University will always be some of my favorite childhood memories, so I will use those as an example of what I mean by emotionally rebooting.

`Dogs are just better than people! Somewhere in Lafayette in 1985, at the house of some of my parents’ friends.`
Private photo/1985 ©My Rønne

`Dragged to one more museum because culture is so good for kids, no matter how many swimming pools you have next to your apartment!`
Private photo/1985 ©My Rønne

South Bend, Indiana

In South Bend, my dad worked in Morris Pollard’s lab at Notre Dame University. Morris and his wife, Molly, were some of the nicest people I have ever met. The way they opened up their home to all the visiting (associate) professors’ and teachers’ kids is something I look back on with happiness and gratitude.

Also, it was in the house of Morris and Molly Pollard that I, for the first and only time in my life, saw original works by Picasso and Chagall in a private home, gifts from the artists themselves. Sadly, I missed the moment because I had a more profound interest in sports than art back then. I was in a house that had guested Picasso AND Chagall, and I did not think it was that big a deal!

Leaving my childhood mishaps and misjudgments aside, there was one more thing that was genuinely exciting to me and my budding romantic notions, and this was the fact that one of Morris and Molly's sons was an intelligence analyst, or, in my childhood way of seeing things, a secret agent! This was the stuff you saw in the movies! It was so exciting, a real-life agent – much more interesting than two dead painters.

In my romantic and innocent eyes, Jonathan Pollard was the South Bend version of James Bond!

Rebooting

So my reboot is an emotional time when people were loving and opened their homes and hearts to me; a time before I learned that no matter what happens to me, I am on my own; a time when I still believed that life would always be good; a time when I loved all animals never realizing they had to die; a time before extreme violence and meaningless deaths.

Summers in Indiana are some of the places in time where I find my day-to-day energy and inspiration– this magical place in time, those two little dots on the timeline of my life.

Going Home

I have left Denmark again and again. Dumb as I am, I have made the mistake of going back. I have been under the illusion that I was going home. I was wrong. And now that I have turned 50 – How did that happen? – I am done lying to myself.

So, the next destination will be home, and when I reach my destination, I will reboot one more time from all the happy dots on the timeline of my life, rediscover that joy of living, forget Denmark, and trust that life can be good and beautiful, get working on that dream garden filled with lilacs and roses, try to love people again – and maybe this time look at the Picassos and Chagalls if I get the chance 😊

“We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.”

Tom Stoppard, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”

Thanks for reading! I hope you found it valuable and worth your time! Until next time, remember to get your facts straight and that whatever good times you have will never come back as bad times,