When I Finally Found My Happy Place and Circumcised the Tip of Florida

You know how sometimes when you’re trying to relax, people tell you to close your eyes and “Go to your happy place?” It took me 36 years to finally discover where my happy place was.

Many times over the years, I’ve found myself in a stressful situation where I’m being told by some well-meaning but annoying person: “Go to your happy place.”

I’ve always hated this phrase because it presupposes that I actually have a “happy place” in my mind. Some location in my memories — real or imagined — where all my stress just vaporizes and my worries disappear, if only for a few fleeting moments.

Does everybody except me have a place like this?

I remember from my earliest days being told by adults to find my happy place. Where, exactly, this was, I can’t recall; perhaps in gymnastics, or perhaps during “quiet time” in the afternoons at preschool.

Down through the years, I’ve found myself in multiple situations where I’m being told by some random professional I don’t know to go to my happy place.

I’m lying flat on my stomach on a massage table. A massage therapist tells me: “Take some slow, deep breaths and find your happy place.”

I’m lying flat on my back on a college classroom floor. The Alexander Technique instructor says: “Breathe quietly, but don’t think about breathing. Feel your spine lengthening, and let go of the tension. Think of your happy place.”

I’m leaning back awkwardly in a dental chair. Some jerk in a white overcoat who’s about to pull my teeth is irritated with me: “RELAX, Ron. Breathe deep. RELAX. Think of your happy place. RELAX,” he says rhythmically.

But what is this bizarre “happy place” of which they speak? And why do people so often invoke it when I’m feeling so terrible? Am I the only one who could never decide what my happy place was?

Most of the time, I tried to imagine a scene from a fictional world I’d read about or seen in a movie, like Alice in Wonderland. I’d squint my eyes and try to imagine “bread-and-butterflies” floating in the breeze near the Dandy Lions, Tiger Lilies, and other talking flowers.

But that always felt forced and weird. Was I Alice in this dream? Was I supposed to do something, like drink a potion or eat a cake?

A happy place like this? Am I doing it right?

Usually, I’d get so deep into thinking about this “happy place” that I was now distracted and thinking about lots of inane details about the vision I was seeing.

“Was ‘the Walrus and the Carpenter’ part of Alice in Wonderland, or was that a different movie? What does a Walrus and Carpenter have to do with Alice, anyway? Now that I think about it, Alice in Wonderland is a really long movie… I wonder if it’s as long as Mary Poppins? That’s a really long movie too…”

Then I’d get overwhelmed by specifics, and while it would be distracting, it wouldn’t be relaxing, which was the whole point of the exercise in the first place.

Well, fast forward to January of 2022. Most years, In January, I take a trip somewhere new, alone. I like to go to a destination I’ve never been to before and explore it with no hard deadlines, agendas, or pre-selected routes. I just like to go… and see what happens.

On this trip, I bought an airplane ticket to Miami and booked an Airbnb in Little Havana. That was all I had on my agenda for a whole week. I left everything else up to chance.

It was a great trip, and I did a lot of the things one does when visiting a place like Little Havana. I ate Cuban Sandwiches and drank Cubanitos, walked around downtown with the chickens and roosters where I got sopping wet in Miami’s famous downpours, went to an outdoor bar with live Son Cubano music, and listened to “Chan Chan” plucked on a Cuban Tres while drinking local beer and smoking a cigar made right there.

But this was not my happy place.

After that, I realized that I was in Miami, home of the Miami Dolphins, my all-time favorite football team ever and that it was football season, and that I was really close to Hard Rock Stadium, and that the Miami Dolphins were playing a game that very week, AND THAT I COULD ACTUALLY AFFORD A TICKET AND GO SEE THEM PLAY. So I did.

I found out that one of my roommates, a man in his 50s from Honduras, was ALSO going to see the Miami Dolphins play, so we decided to carpool.

We went to the football game. THE DOLPHINS WON. They actually beat the New England Patriots, which is really saying something since the Patriots have been to 11 Super Bowls and won 6 of them, while the Dolphins have only been to 5 Super Bowls and won 2 of them.

But this was not my happy place.

As the week was winding down, I realized I’d been near the beach this whole time but hadn’t actually gone to the beach yet. So the day before I had to fly back home, I woke up with the thought: I want to see a lot of beach before I leave. More beach than I’ve ever seen.

So I slept in for a bit, then got in the convertible Ford Mustang I rented and just started driving. Where was I going? I had no idea.

I had no plans, no agenda, no requirements, and no destination. I just wanted to hit the gas pedal and see what happened. I started driving south.

On a whim, I took a right turn and headed west. I was on the eastern edge of Florida’s tip but decided I’d drive to the other side of the state just for fun.

And there it was. I finally found it.

This was my happy place.

Heading west on Highway 41 in Ochopee, an unincorporated community just south of Big Cypress National Preserve, at 1:18 pm on a sunny Wednesday in January, I found my happy place.

This was it. I finally found it right here.

I found that long-lost, mythical, unreachable place that was very real at that moment, and I could always imagine it again in the future. The place where all my worries were gone, and I didn’t care about work, or stress, or life, or strife, or any other problems that could possibly keep me down.

I was happy. Purely, completely, 100% happy.

This was something I had never experienced before in my entire life.

I’ve come somewhat close since that time, but that was the very first moment when I finally discovered the happy place I’d wondered about for over 36 years.

I was off the grid, offline, away from home, not working, in a new convertible with the top down, in my favorite state. The sun was still shining. I still had half a day left.

There wasn’t a single thing I could think about except how incredible it was that I could roar down this highway at an illegal speed, and all I could see everywhere was green, green, and more green.

All I had to worry about was not running out of gas.

I passed by signs that had some of the strangest words I’d ever seen before: Tamiami Trail, Chokoloskee, Miccosukee Reserved Area, Fakahatchee Pass, Dismal Key, Keewaydin Island Beach.

All of them called to me, and I could go see any one of them that I wanted.

Right there: that tiny little red dot—there it is.

I decided to go south for a bit, so I popped down to Marco Island, stopping by a Publix first to get snacks and sunscreen. I hadn’t even packed sunscreen when I left because I had no idea where I was going to end up.

I paid $8 at a parking lot and went to the beach in Marco Island and combed for shells in my bare feet for hours. I sat on the sand, my phone off, looking out at the waves.

As the sun began to set, I thought, “This was fun. But I need more beach.”

So, I got back in the car and headed even further west. I thought about stopping by Turtle Island but decided to go all the way to the western edge of the state.

I paid for street parking right next to the pier, and walked up and down Naples Beach for an hour or two, taking in the beauty of the ocean and the magical way it was lit up by the lights from the houses on the waterfront.

It still wasn’t enough, so I got back in my car and drove around until I found downtown Naples. There was a free parking lot, so I stopped there and went walking around downtown.

I found a little coffee shop, got a chocolate raspberry mocha, and just sat for an hour sipping my hot drink and listening to the music.

I had come to Florida to visit Miami—a scrappy town built by poor Cuban immigrants, filled with Afro-Cuban music, food, and culture—but was now sitting in a luxurious Italian café, just a few hours away in an astonishingly wealthy town built by rich escapees from Beverly Hills.

Naples was dazzlingly lit up like it was preparing for a Christmas parade. There were no chickens in sight, and the musicians on the streets played classical music with violins, not Rumba music with Claves.

It was almost an out-of-body experience. The day still wasn’t over yet. I got back in my car and drove up north a bit to take Alligator Alley back to Miami. After 2 or 3 hours on a straight, flat, boring road in the middle of nowhere in the pitch-black darkness, I saw Miami again. The giant skyscrapers with purple lights looked like neon mirages as I drove past.

In one last-ditch attempt to take in a little more Miami before the night was over, I dropped into Versailles, “The World’s Most Famous Cuban Restaurant®” and got a “The Criollo,” a giant sampler of Cuban food, including yellow rice, Ropa Vieja, fried pork chunks, ham croquette, plantains, tamales, and cassava. I took it back to my Airbnb and ate alone in the dark while sipping on chilled Kahlua.

The next day, I woke up early and checked out of my Airbnb several hours before it was time to fly back home, and I took in even more of Florida’s beautiful beaches.

I drove across the bridge to Miami Beach, where I swam for a bit, then sat drying off on the sand, drinking Starbucks Doubleshots.

It was a wild thought: I had flown all the way to Florida and had almost forgotten to see the beach during the week I was there. Then, during the last 24 hours, I spent time at a beach on Florida’s southern tip, eastern edge, and western edge. I spent time in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Wow.

I drove to the airport and flew back home.

During my week alone, in a town on the other side of the country, I finally found my happy place.

But weirdly enough, it wasn’t at Miami Beach, Marco Island Beach, or Naples Beach. It was right here, alone, out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between all of those locations. I don’t know why, exactly, but it was.

To this day, whenever people ask me to “go to my happy place,” I’m not mad anymore. I know exactly where I’m going in my mind. I remember it like it was yesterday.

And that’s a very good feeling.

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By the way, if you’re wondering why this is partially titled “Circumcising Florida’s Tip,” that’s because of a funny quirk I noticed after my trip was over.

When I looked back at my Google Maps timeline, the route I took across the state that day looked a little strange.

Boy, oh boy, what does that remind me of?

I don’t know why I never noticed this before, but Florida actually has quite a phallic shape, and if you view the lines that showed where I drove, it kind of looks like I had cut off its tip.

By circumnavigating the state that day, it looked like I circumcised it.

What does that have to do with finding my happy place? Absolutely nothing. They’re totally unrelated. I just thought it would be funny to mention it here.