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Posts Tagged ‘personal reflection’

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Living Your Best Life

In Opinion, Uncategorized on August 18, 2026 at 10:26 am

Deer In Headlines

By Gery Deer

One summer afternoon, not that long ago, I was sitting near the beach at the lake where I live when I noticed families scattered across the shoreline. Children splashed, parents chatted, and a young lifeguard watched everything with quiet confidence. It looked ordinary, which is probably why it caught my attention.

A little girl sat alone on a wooden bench swing, happily working through a Drumstick ice cream cone. She wore a bathing suit covered with colorful cupcakes. Her grandparents rested beneath a nearby shade tree, smiling and keeping watch without interrupting. She seemed completely content. She had sunshine, a swing, an ice cream cone, a lake, and people who loved her. What else did she need? Apparently, nothing. She was, as they say, living her best life.

That phrase, “living your best life,” has become part of our modern lexicon. We hear it or read it nearly every day. It appears beneath vacation photos, fitness posts, images of expensive dinners, and carefully staged moments designed to convince everyone that life’s rewards have reached their highest possible level. Somewhere along the way, we started believing that our best life should be permanent. I am not sure that is true. How could it be? Life is all about change. We may not like it, but it is.

Maybe living your best life is not a destination. Maybe it is something that quietly appears for a few minutes before slipping away. Maybe those instances are unrelated to the ones that preceded or followed them.

That little girl was not thinking about tomorrow. She was not worried about retirement accounts, deadlines, insurance premiums, or whether mindless online doomscrollers approved of her choices. She was not comparing herself with strangers or wondering if she should have accomplished more by now. She simply existed inside that afternoon, on that swing, with that ice cream cone. It was her entire world.

Adults rarely allow themselves that gift. We’re always planning away every moment. We carry calendars in our pockets and unfinished conversations in our heads. We worry about what happened yesterday and rehearse what might happen tomorrow. Even while sitting beside a beautiful lake, we are often somewhere else entirely.

Children remind us that joy does not always arrive wrapped inside major accomplishments. Sometimes it comes wearing cupcake swimwear, dripping vanilla ice cream down your hand while your feet swing freely above the ground. Those moments still exist for us, but they become harder to notice because we keep expecting fireworks instead of fireflies.

Looking back, I doubt that little girl will remember that specific afternoon. The details will probably fade from her memory over time, like an old photo in a scrapbook. Yet something more important will remain. She will remember what it felt like to be safe, loved, carefree, and wonderfully present.

Perhaps that is what we are really chasing when we talk about living our best lives. Not perfection, but presence. Maybe our best lives are never measured in years, careers, possessions, or achievements. Maybe they are measured in moments that seem almost too ordinary to matter until we realize they were the moments that mattered most.

Years from now, I probably will not remember what color the lifeguard’s chair was or how many people were swimming. I might forget the weather forecast or whether the parking lot was full. But I have never forgotten that little girl because she unknowingly answered a question adults keep asking.

Happiness is rarely complicated. We complicate it. We convince ourselves that one more promotion, one bigger house, one better vacation, or one perfect opportunity will finally unlock contentment. Then we reach those milestones and immediately invent another finish line.

Children, thankfully, have not learned that habit yet. They celebrate the cone before worrying about the wrapper. They feel the breeze before checking the forecast. They wave at strangers without wondering whether it looks silly. There is wisdom there if we are willing to see it.

Perhaps growing older does not have to mean growing away from wonder. Maybe the real challenge is protecting enough of our childlike gratitude to recognize life’s quiet gifts while they are still in our hands today and simply say thanks.

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What Grounds You?

In Local News, Opinion, Uncategorized on May 3, 2026 at 11:27 am

Deer In Headlines
By Gery Deer

In a world that never stops talking, the hardest thing to do is listen for silence. We scroll, swipe, click, and chase, convinced the next notification might carry something essential. Most of the time, it doesn’t. It just adds another layer of noise to an already crowded headspace, another reason to forget where we are standing and who we were before the noise found us.

That is why the question matters: what grounds you? Not in some abstract, self-help sense, but in the real, tactile way that keeps your feet planted when everything else feels like it is spinning. Grounding is not a trend. It is a tether. It is the quiet, stubborn force that keeps you from drifting too far into anxiety, ambition, or the endless churn of digital life.

I have come to believe that grounding lives in the senses. It is the weight of something familiar in your hands, the sound of a rhythm you have known for years, the smell that pulls you backward through time without asking permission. It is not complicated, and that is precisely why we overlook it. We are trained to chase what is new, not what is true.

For me, those anchors are unapologetically analog. There is the click of a typewriter key, sharp and deliberate, a sound that refuses to be rushed. There is the feel of bicycle handlebars steady under my grip, reminding me that forward motion does not require a screen. And there is an old truck, a 1967 International Harvester grain truck, that answers to the name Serenity.

Serenity is not subtle. It is steel and wood and history, the kind of machine that demands your attention simply by existing. But for me, it carries something quieter. It carries the low thrum of an engine from childhood, the memory of time spent beside my father, learning without realizing I was learning. It carries the echo of music played with family, the shared language of rhythm and repetition.

In that way, the truck is more than an object. It is a bridge. It connects who I was to who I am, and it does so without asking for an update or a password. It simply exists, waiting patiently, ready to remind me that not everything meaningful needs to be optimized, digitized, or shared.

I suspect we all have something like that, even if we have not named it yet. Maybe it is the smell of coffee brewing before dawn, or the steady weight of a dog settling into your lap at the end of a long day. Maybe it is a song that hits the same way every time, no matter how many years pass.

The problem is not that these things are hard to find. The problem is that we are rarely still long enough to notice them. The world benefits from our distraction. It profits from our attention being constantly pulled somewhere else. Stillness, on the other hand, does not monetize well. It does not trend. It simply works.

When the noise gets loud, and it will, those anchors matter. They give us a place to return to, a baseline that reminds us we are more than our inboxes and timelines. They pull us back into our bodies, into the present moment, into something real. Without them, it is far too easy to drift, to lose the thread of ourselves in the endless scroll.

So ask yourself the question and answer it honestly. What is your tether? What is the thing that keeps you here when everything else tries to carry you away? Find it. Name it. Keep it close. Because when the storm comes, and it always does, you will need to know exactly what holds you to the ground.

In the end, grounding is not about escaping the modern world. It is about surviving it with your sense of self intact. It is about choosing, again and again, to return to what is real, even when what is real feels quieter than the noise. That choice may be small, even invisible to anyone else, but it is powerful. It is the difference between being carried along and standing firm.

Hold on to it, always.