The Life You Want
“Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be? If only we knew what we wanted. Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”
Thomas Merton
When my kids were little and I was beginning my career I was working 50-60 hours a week trying to find new business to make sure I got a paycheck so I could deposit it and then send it off in bits and pieces to all the creditors and hopefully have some left over. Then the weekend would come and I became the groundskeeper, handyman, and caretake of the house that owned me. No one knew this but it was true. That house owned my life for decades. I gave away thousand of hours of my life to pay for it, thousands more to fix, clean, maintain, and improve it.
Everyone I knew seemed to be doing the same. Each weekend all the neighbors would come out and begin toiling away like farmers tending crops that were for display only. Each garage contained some combination of the same equipment to take care of our pointless farming. Sometimes I’d stop and imagine the millions of hours of wasted life each weekend cutting the grass. Raking leaves. Cleaning things and fixing things. At the end of the hard day in the “fields” people would get cleaned up and go out to eat or go to a store and buy food other people made to celebrate their hard work.
If that is truly your life’s passion then put this away and be happy you know what you want. But, if you are spending your days doing “have to” kind of chores, tasks, and jobs and or you feel your home or other aspects of your life are eating all your time and money then right now begin your escape plan. How do you really want to spend your time/life? What are the things that truly light you up that you could do for hours and never have it feel like work?
How many decades do you have on this planet? How do you want to spend them? Get out a journal or open a new document on your computer and begin asking yourself these questions without regard to what everybody else is doing, what your friends are doing, what your family will think. We are here on this tiny speck of dust hurling through space for a blip of time. All we have is THIS moment. In this moment you can decide to listen to what is calling you and say YES to taking action right now. Maybe that action is just writing out your goals.
Several years ago I engaged in a program called the Strategic Coach, created by Dan Sullivan. I got so many life changing benefits from this program. One of the exercises we did was to get write down the day we were going to die. Day, year, month. Then we were instructed to write out all that we had done in our lives. All of our accomplishments, adventures, projects, and memories. Then, we picked a day 10 year from the current time and wrote out what we would have had to have done and accomplished to be on track for the lifetime list. Then 5 years. Then 1 year. Then the next 90 days, one month, one week. Doing this helped me see the gap between what I wanted and what I was doing. It helped me see that I wasn’t at all on a trajectory towards the things that I wanted. I was obsessed with my health because I was hoping to live long enough to do the things in my dreams one day.
It took the death of my parents to shake me awake and to realize One day is now! Now is when we must take action in the direction of our dreams. Moving in the direction of our dreams opens up relationships, opportunities, and experiences that enrich our lives and those around us. Taking action towards our dreams can be as simple as acknowledging them. Getting a book. Watching a video. Talking to others who have done what we want to do and asking them how they did it.
If you don’t have enough money, how much money do you need? If you aren’t earning enough money what skills do you need to earn the kind of money you’d like to earn. Knowing we want and having a plan to move TOWARD it will light a fire in us that makes life so much more full. Knowing what I wanted helped me get rid of expenses that were not fulfilling. I massively reduced my cost of living and doubled my efforts with my career to get the results I wanted.
We’ll never do all that we want, but taking action in the direction of our dreams is the best we can do and it will fuel our actions and give us joy.
Enjoy the journey!
Photo by Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash