6-7

6-7 is, I think, mostly dead now.

But for a few months it was the new phrase of the internet and “the youths”.

I can’t keep up anymore.

What is “6-7”?

No one knows.

That’s what makes it so funny / catchy.

It means nothing. It’s like “whatever”.

Being the witty boy he is, Beau chose 67 for his baseball number, and in turn received lots of laughs and jokes while out in the field with his team and anyone running the bases from the other team.

“hey! 6-7!” Then they’d do this little dance thing with their arms. It was so great.

I had this thought this morning, though. Revolving around in my mind as I tried to go back to bed but kept thinking about the day (Saturday) and what exactly we’d do.

We don’t have anything really pressing to get done, although we can always clean more and fix something, it’s not really all that necessary. Maybe I’ll wash the cars, actually.

But that’s not the point. What I was really trying to figure out was how to optimize the weekend for something exciting.

Nothing wrong with this. Especially in my position where I’m mostly home all week and working inside, I like to make sure that there’s time built in to go do something fun with the family to make it all feel worth it.

But the deeper thing beneath the thing is really contentment and satisfaction.

As my mind was thinking of a list:
– farmers market
– park
– hike
– zoo
– bike ride
– etc…

I was brought back to this thought shared by someone in an AA group I used to attend when I was first experimenting with sobriety.

This guy Nick shared that a lot of sobriety is learning to make peace with a 6 or 7.

Meaning, we suffer from this self-inflicted, yet socially reinforced, notion that life ought to feel like a 9 or 10 out of 10 experience on the pain to pleasure scale.

We optimize our lives to avoid pain and increase moments of pleasure, even if only for a few minutes or hours of feeling ‘high’.

Drugs, alcohol, shopping, sex, entertainment, food, work, busyness…

It’s really a preoccupation with not feeling low. It can be exhausting, ironically.

Nick made the case that while we’re so busy optimizing and obsessing over feeling that 9-10/10, most days, as you come to realize and accept as a sober person, are a 6-7/10.

It’s average.

But average is not bad. Average just means you’re not getting this constant flood of dopamine and rush of pleasure. Which is a good thing.

Your body and mind and heart actually have a chance to calibrate and experience contrast. To feel all of life. Even boredom and loneliness and ‘blah’.

And I think what we avoid is mostly this feeling that we won’t get back to a 9 or a 10. So we chase it.

Instead of letting it find us.

If we can slow down. Be aware. Try to settle into what is instead of what we want something to be. We may find that our capacity to endure a 6 or 7 actually begins to bring the scale into a perspective that doesn’t associate soaring highs with a 9 or 10 at all. That the number system and chase of feeling an emotion is rigged.

You get out of the vicious cycle by focusing on staying in the game of what’s happening now and not focusing on the distractions over there in some illusory version of ‘your-life-2.0’.

I think an antidote to 9-10 chasing is working slowly and steadily on something challenging.

Something that makes you sweat and is a work in progress.

Something that demands your attention and will and that you show up regardless of the finish line.

Something that can help others or expand your self-imposed limits and boundaries of what’s possible.

Running, art, helping at church, creating a business, giving yourself to parenting in a present way, performing, building anything.

I’ve experienced this and it’s so freeing. It feels boring and monotonous most days.

But when I look back on journal entries of chasing and obsessing over 9-10 optimization, I will gladly trade it for

6-7.