“I’m Chris LaMura. I am 39 years old, and I’ve been living in Breezy Point for my entire life.” I sat with Chris at his home in Breezy. He greeted me on crutches. Within the same week earlier in the summer, he and his wife welcomed a beautiful third baby, and Chris broke his leg. “How lucky are we to have problems that can be fixed,” he said about the leg.
“My mother grew up in Brooklyn like, sort of near like Marine Park-ish, like Gerritsen almost, and my father grew up in Lefferts Gardens by like Ebbets Field by like where Dodger Stadium used to be…but we moved here when I was six months old. They were really living, like…they were living by The Junction, by like Brooklyn College kind of. And then bought a house here in ‘87. We’ve been here since,” LaMura said. “I’ve been lucky. You know, I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve been to like 30 or 40 different countries in my life. A lot of it to surf. And you know, I lived in London, I lived in Spain for a little bit. I spent a couple months in Indonesia. Home is home. And you know what, now that I’ve traveled all over the world and I’ve lived and worked in a lot of different places, the community of people that you have in this neighborhood that are willing to assist you if you need something because they’re you’re friends or neighbors–or like, the amount of people that have come and reached out to us because I broke my leg recently or [because] we had our third kid, is amazing. Like, they’re just wonderful humans—and I’ve met wonderful humans all over the world, but community-wise, there’s just much more of them here! And there are more people here who genuinely are just good people. I mean, they also know how hard it is to struggle and the hustle and machine of New York City. So you’re kind of in like a fraternity of other people who just grind all day, and they get it. [We have] a lot of city employees and just, good people who are kind and honest and are really just good people, so it’s hard to leave, and yeah, I also bought a house eight years ago when houses were semi-affordable, and now I couldn’t leave if I wanted to, but I don’t want to.
“I’m a special education teacher for the last 15 years. I’m a nightclub DJ for 20 years; since I had kids, I slowed down a bit. I play a gig like once every couple months. I probably play like three gigs, four gigs a year, which is fine. And I just wrote a book on positivity! It’s great; it’s called “Strictly Positivity” and the focus of it is to remind yourself of the small, important things that we forget are important. And it’s not reinventing the wheel. It’s all things that everybody already knows, but you kind of forget to prioritize. So the point of it is that you spend five to 10 minutes a day in the morning, a minute in the middle of the day, and five to ten minutes at night. So it should take you between 10- and 20-minutes total in a day. Five days a week, weekends off. For 12 weeks. Um, and I like it.” The target audience is 8-108, though LaMura joked, “You’d have to be like a pretty old soul for an 8-year-old.” The book is broken down into 12 chapters, each exploring a tenet of positive living. Each chapter is accompanied by suggested (required) reading, mindful practices, and journal prompts. Soon, a companion journal and a university-level course will accompany the book (which can now be purchased online at https://strictlypositivity.com
Though LaMura loves teaching, the idea to write a book came recently. “A year and a half ago, almost two years ago, I passed out in the water while I was surfing. And I almost drowned. But I woke up, and I was like, I was literally treading water in like seven-foot surf. I just passed out in the water. And I mean, I was taking some meds at the time, which I think had something to do with it, but the doctor was like, ‘eh, I don’t know,’ like I’m pretty sure something happened. I’ve done this [surfing] my whole life and it just never happened. But they were like, ‘Well, your heart’s a little–it’s pretty erratic, and honestly, if you go down this route again and you keep surfing like this and you pass out again, you’re going to die. Because you didn’t die last time, and that’s miraculous.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve been surfing for 30 years; I know how to tread water whether I’m asleep or not,’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, but I wouldn’t bank on that.’” Practice water safety, never swim or surf alone!
“So either way, my doctor was like, ‘Listen, you need to make arrangements. Like if you do this again, you’re going to abandon your family, and you’re going to die, and you’re going to leave your children. You’re going to abandon your children. And I was like, ‘Oh sh*t, I don’t want to do that.’ And so, because of that, I started writing down an instruction manual for my children of: ‘These are the things I think are important, that if I’m not here to teach you, this is what’s really important in life,’ and then slowly, but surely, as I started writing it, I got like overly attached to it.”
Eventually, it turned into “Strictly Positivity.”
“That’s the reason I’m still [living] here; that’s the reason why we’re all still [living] here, honestly. That’s the reason why I still live in this neighborhood–is because I can go have that conversation with most of the people in this neighborhood and in Rockaway and in–honestly, with most New Yorkers. You can hop on the train, and somebody drops their textbooks, and six people go to help them. Why do six random New Yorkers go help someone who dropped their textbooks? Because they’re all hustling and they’re all struggling and they all know how hard it is and how much it sucks to be on a rush hour train and you drop all your sh*t on the floor. And everybody knows what that’s like because everybody is grinding, and that makes us a big family. And that’s really important. I want people to focus on that more, and I want to focus on it more myself.
“And I really started writing it [the book] because I want my kids to focus on that more when they grow up. Because they’re going to make the world a better place. Because that’s the type of people we are. And that’s important. And everybody’s like, ‘Oh politics,’ or “Oh bullsh*t,’ or ‘Oh the NFL,’ and I’m like, ‘Look, all those things are fine and good, I get that. But that’s not important to me. No president, no celebrity, no whoever is going to walk into my living room and read books to my kids and teach them how to be awesome. That’s my job. And now that I’m a father of three, that’s the only job I want. But I want the world to be a better place so that when my kids are my age, people are just a little bit kinder than they are now. It’s wild because, like, I didn’t know this was going to become a business or a plan or a book; I just wrote it because I was like, ‘Holy sh*t, if I die this week, at least my kids will have this.”
