Part of a 12-blog series for the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts.

Scout Law point #8: “A scout is cheerful.” Or else.

Does that really have to be a law? Doesn’t making it a law take some of the cheer out of it? Or if you’re really cheery, does it matter what’s required and what’s optional?

As my own form of happy lawlessness, I’ll more or less completely shift gears now. We are social animals. It’s not natural, or particularly cheerful, to be a recluse. Don’t believe the writer’s conceit: that we’re actually writing down real experience. Ideally we go out and live life for a while, jot some notes in our pocket spiral pad, and eventually hole up somewhere to try and write down what happened. It’s kind of like scrapbooking. Creepy, right? Sorry scrapbookers, but you aren’t exactly living in the present, are you?

Perhaps I underestimate the present-tense appeal of photo corners, squiggly scissors, and puffy paint. But look at the photos you’re pasting in there: you saved them and you’re sharing them for a reason, right? Probably a particularly happy time? Or a moment that brings past emotions forward to the present where they clash with our current state of mind? That might explain the night I spent many months ago, picking photos of my brother’s dog, Brutus. It was a tribute, a sort of scrapbook I created, on the day I heard he died.

Yes, we should learn from the past, but I think we underestimate our need to find something to be cheerful about in the present. Some big brain once said we only use 10 percent of our brains. I think that’s good: brains are overrated. What if we stopped trying to use our brains so much and let current experience inform our guts, our hearts, those less brainy parts of ourselves that control critical functions like, oh, say, keeping our hearts beating and our lungs breathing.

When we realize that there are physical costs we pay for emotional stress— hello backaches, migraines, ulcers, heartburn, and all the follies of the accident-prone multi-tasker— we realize maybe we should take better care of these machines that surround and transport us physically through the world. Without these little flesh and bone jalopies of ours, we would be naked ghostly psyches roaming the world passing our wispy hands right through all the faces we actually long to touch. Don Hertzfeldt illustrated a bizarre variation on this— a population of brains attached to spinal cords roaming the earth— in his animated short, Everything Will Be OK.

I’m a tyrant to scrapbookers? It takes one to know one. I love the past: I dwell there often in my career and in my hobbies. But I’ve learned to believe that if it’s really that magical, we shouldn’t dwell there. Bring that magic back to our world here and now.

I’ve been calling Steve’s new dog ‘Brutus.’ All it took was a little present-tense wrestling, a few toy-stealing antics that were purely Flash (and nothing to do with Brutus), and I’m cheerfully back from scrapbook la-la land, loving the present.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Photos © SeattleHamiltons