what?
“How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives”…Annie Dillard
Moving on from the last couple of posts on how to live the life you want to live; a life of freedom; freedom to choose what you do on any given day.
We’ve already agreed that we must deal with the issue of money; the getting of, the keeping of and the managing of.
If you need any further convincing that this is worth doing then read the quote by Annie Dillard at the top of this post and consider it for a moment. If you continue to fall for the trap that is consumerism and unfulfilling work then you are trying to do the impossible; you are trying to save up your good times for later. How we spend our days is indeed how we spend our lives. I now spend my days doing the things I want to do.
So far we’ve dug into the philosophy behind the free life and the folly of waiting until the time is right which is typified by our obsession with new year resolutions.
We looked deeper into what living…really living is, and arrived at a situation where we get to choose exactly what we do on any given day. We then looked at the practicalities or otherwise of getting into that seemingly idealistic position and of course we discovered the big elephant in everyone’s room…money!
Money is the most absurd of ideas…a human invention that seeks to keep those without it enslaved to those with. However, none of us have the time to debate or resolve that…life is short.
Based on these facts, it’s probably best to accept the situation and to use the tools of capitalism for our own ends, but in a way that doesn’t compromise our principles of freedom for all. The greatest of these tools is what Capitalists call assets.
Yesterday we got up to the point where we decided to just get started on creating a lifestyle where we use our interests to make a living.
Make your life your living; not your living your life…meditate on that for a moment…it’s an equation with a huge gulf in the middle of it.
So getting started…what’s the first step?…a Mindmap®.
What’s a Mindmap? it’s a one page representation of ideas that is created intuitively by working the way thoughts work, i.e not a linear list where it’s difficult to backtrack to fit in new thoughts/ideas. Created and developed by Tony Buzan, the Mindmap® is your friend in planning anything from a tea party to a life (in our case).
This doesn’t warrant any deep explanation by me; I just use them to good effect. If you want more theory, Google Tony Buzan (I’ll add some of the best books on the subject to the reading page soon).
What we want in this case is a Mindmap® where you get down on one sheet of paper, all of the things you like to do and skills you have that could contribute to you making an income from the life you want to live. Here’s mine:
You can most easily create a Mindmap® with a pencil and paper, but for presentation purposes I’ve used the SimpleMind Free app for Mac, available at the app store.
Tomorrow, I’ll go deeper into how you can make your life your living. Let’s get started!
Annie Dillard link; credit to Maria Popova for the brilliant brainpickings.org
Photo Credit: CarbonNYC [in SF!] via Compfight cc
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