A picture of a curved line graph. The area under the lines looks like green hills. There are flowers and trees at the top of the peaks of the graph.

A number of weeks ago, I was sitting in a small park in rural Eastern Europe. I was there on holiday with Grumpy Metal Girl, and the youngest of the Grumpy Metal Children was running around, pretending that he was taking part in a wall of death. At least, that’s what he was doing in my mind, he was actually running up and down the playground equipment and getting sand in his nether regions, but a Grumpy Metal Guy can dream! I managed to ignore the screams for snacks and attention for long enough to put my head back and look up at the surrounding trees and the sky overhead. It was a fairly regular spring day, the sun was shining, and to top things off, I wasn’t combusting in the sun - surprising for one of my kind1.

As I sat there, my mind naturally started wandering. The town I was in was small - less than 5000 residents. Save for an unexpected turn of events a decade ago, I would likely never have visited it, let alone found myself sat here, relaxing. Then again, for some people, this may be one of the few parks that they actually visit. For people that had grown up here, this may well be their favourite park. But, how would they know it was their favourite park? Was this some kind of local maxima in terms of park enjoyment?

I mean, I’ve been to many different parks in my decades spinning around Sol. Many have been bigger. Tons of them had more trees for sure. And while there were some fun things for Grumpy Metal Child to play on, it certainly didn’t compete with many of the places even he had been to before. So, why was it that I was getting the non-grumpy feels for this place? Why was I - *gasp* - enjoying myself?

Someone with a much better wit for catchy phrases once said (roughly) that the best camera you can get is the one you have when you need one. I’m starting to think that the same thing applies to parks and other places of enjoyment. You’re certainly not going to visit all the parks in the world in your time on the planet, and even if you did visit them all and find your favourite place in the whole of the howling void, your concept of a global maxima will be different to mine. Your experience is a function of both the place itself, and your memories and associations with it. So really speaking, the local maxima you are at now may as well be the global maxima for that point in time.

Fuck FOMO. Embrace your local maxima and live in the moment. Who knows, you might even enjoy the experience be a bit less grumpy.

  1. Programmer, metal head, and INTJ. ↩︎