Conan’s Wisdom

So alas, Conan O’Brien has quit as host of The Tonight Show for real. On Friday night he hosted his final show and gave a very heartfelt farewell speech. His parting words were humble, grateful and inspiring, and he closed out with a plea to his younger viewers urging them not to let ConanLeno-Gate 2010 leave them with a cynical attitude. Apparently cynicism is one of Conan’s least favorite qualities and, incidentally, it’s also one of mine. As Conan so aptly put it: “Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get, but if you work really hard and are kind, amazing things will happen.” True ‘dat Big C, true ‘dat.

Conan’s little nugget of life wisdom really hit home with me on a personal level. I was recently pissing and moaning to my father about an impending life change that’s got me feeling a tad ambivalent, despite the fact that it hardly qualifies as a negative turn of events for me. After dutifully listening to me gripe my dad finally said, “Punkin,” (Yes, my dad calls me Punkin—shut it!), “Nothing in life is ever totally perfect, so there’s no point in fixating on all of the little things that aren’t exactly how you want them to be, because if you do that, you’ll never be satisfied or happy.” I knew he was absolutely right, and to then hear Conan say essentially the same thing one week later only cemented the truth of his advice more firmly in my mind.

I consider myself to be a pretty positive person in general, but I feel an especially strong determination to keep my focus in the coming year on all of the wonderful and amazing things in my life, rather than on the things I wish were different. Truth be told, this should hardly be a daunting task for me considering how incredibly blessed I’ve been overall: I have a great family; a job that I absolutely love; good health and amazing people in my life. When I really think about these things, the minor bumps and challenges that sideline me every now and then seem insignificant in comparison.

Along the same vein, I recently read a great quote in an Esquire “What I’ve Learned” interview with one of my favorite actors, Kelsey Grammer. One of the things “Dr. Frasier” says he’s learned over the years is that he cannot control what happens, he can only control how he reacts. I’ve always prescribed to this line of thinking, but I guess I just loved how succinctly he was able to paraphrase the whole approach. Being the neurotic humans that we are, I think we have a natural tendency to fixate on everything that’s not going right in our lives and to agonize over all of the things we should have, or could have, done differently to change the course of our path. While this is a perfectly understandable behavior, the fact is, it doesn’t accomplish shit. Worrying is like a rocking chair: It gives you something to do but it doesn’t get you anywhere. We all obsess over the daily choices we make, our “To Do” lists, our personal lives and everything in between, but there has to be a point when we say to ourselves, “Okay. That happened. It totally sucked balls, but I learned [insert monumental or trivial corresponding life lesson here] from the experience, and now I’ve got to move forward and tackle what’s in front of me.”

So, yes. My dad and Conan are right. Nothing is ever 100-percent perfect. And although we as individuals achieve all sorts of wonderful things constantly over the course of our lives, we never stop wanting more—or, we get what we think we wanted and then decide that we desire something else entirely. Given our propensity for this sort of self-inflicted torture and misery, it seems that our best hope for attaining serenity is to train ourselves to accept life’s inevitable flaws and learn to devote the bulk of our thoughts and energy to the acknowledgement and appreciation of its innumerable gifts.

I’ve come to realize that opportunities almost never present themselves in precisely the way I’d like, and my error has been to assume that this somehow makes them less valuable, or less good. Opportunities are what we make of them, plain and simple. SO, here’s to unexpected change. It’s never asked for and it’s rarely easy, but it often leads to phenomenal things.