What Are You Willing to Trade?

Oh, my. I just read a news story about a man who enlisted the help of his two friends in order to make $671,000. Their plan? Find a chain saw, strap it to a pole so the friends doing the cutting don’t have to stand too close (wouldn’t want this to get messy…) and use it to cut off the man’s hand. Are you kidding me? Sacrifice a limb for money? And if you do, somehow, manage to allow this to happen, you get what that man received… no hand and a felony charge, including 20 year prison sentence, for insurance fraud.

Although I am horrified by this story, I am not unaware of the fact that each of us face choices like these, every day. Ok, so maybe you’re not trying to decide which of your own eyes you will pluck out in order to collect disability, but you are making decisions that require you to answer, “How far will you go?” And, although some of those questions are about money, (like, “will you trade time with your family to stay later at the office,” or “will you risk $5000 in the stock market, in order to hope to make $10,000?”), some of our trades and choices are about less measurable things. Will you stay with a man who ignores your feelings so that you don’t have to be alone? Will you be less than honest so that your friend’s feelings aren’t hurt? Will you eat the third donut, because they taste really wonderful, eventhough you know you should go for a walk, instead? 

It seems to me that the daily task of decision making boils down to a system of calculations: traded value vs. received value, and risk vs. benefit. Does what we are trading have less value than what we are receiving? In the case of the trading of a hand for a little over $200,000 (remember, the sum they received has to be split over three people), and risking a felony conviction, we might think the answer is a resounding, “No!” For some reason, however, that imbalance wasn’t very clear to the guy in the news story. Just like, in the case of trading the time you could spend eating dinner with your family for more billable hours at the firm, the answer might not be as clear for you.

It makes me wonder which of the choices I make seem obviously imbalanced to others. Could the possible key to all of life be that we should get better at calculating trade values and risk vs. benefit? I would like to invite all of my friends to feel free to help me make these kinds of calculations in my life. And whatever I might say in the future, regardless of what case I make for it, please… never, ever tie a chain saw to a pole and help me cut off my hand.  

Less with More

Less with More

I have some friends who are still in their 20’s & 30’s. They help me remember optimism. When I was that young (and that old), I remember that I had the clarity to realize that the world held every opportunity and that I was completely equipped to take advantage of all of them. I was aware that any decision I made could be reversed if it wasn’t right for me. I could scrap a career and start over, if I wanted. I could have a relationship, decide it wasn’t working, and walk away. Somewhere after I turned 40, however, that perception changed. I started to evaluate myself in a different way, believing that my choices were now more limited, that I needed to have been more “settled” by now, that I needed to have used all of the gifts with which I have been blessed in some more meaningful way. I felt somewhat ashamed to have not made a larger contribution to the world than I had, given that I am so advantaged.

When I shared these thoughts with a friend of mine, he said, “I know what you mean! I’ve done less with more than anybody I know!”

Although he was at least half joking, that statement exactly summarized how I felt. In fact, I wonder if it’s not exactly that sentiment that describes many of our mid-life insecurities, as we scrutinize where we have been, what we have done or not done, and where we may have fallen short. Most of us have been blessed beyond measure with talent, opportunity, kindness, friendships, education, and other advantages too numerous to mention. On some level, we recognize that and cannot believe we haven’t accomplished more. We may also see some of the things that we perceive have held us back in some way, and we have resentments that we may not know how to reconcile or forgive. It’s a constant balancing act between the self-chastising that comes from knowing we “could have, but didn’t” and the victim-thinking of, “if only [someone or something] wouldn’t have sabotaged my efforts.”

I also have some friends who are now in their 50’s & 60’s. They, too, help me remember optimism. They talk to me about their own struggle with this balancing act of self-recrimination and evaluation, and how they have now forgiven themselves and others. They have become settled in their own skin. They have recognized that life is not something that should be evaluated as something we should have “won” by now. They seem to accept that there is always more to be done, that there are always dreams to chase, that there are always going to be limiting factors and road blocks that can be either navigated or removed, and that navigating or removing them is always a choice. My friends who have made it through this challenge of looking around and saying, “Oh! I should have done [something] by now,” and then saying, “It’s ok. I have. And I have not. And I am still alive, so I am still living,” are my inspiration. 

Because I have these friends, the younger ones who inspire me to be wide-eyed and excited about what the world has to offer, the “my-age” friends who “get me,” and the things that vex me, and my older friends who teach me to enjoy the relaxed comfort of settling into my own life and stride, I think I might just avert my “Mid-Life Crisis,” and simply have a mid-life. And today I have recognized that, of all of the “more,” I’ve been given, the most important of these things has been these diverse friends who help me dream, see, and enjoy. Thank you to all of you! Be with your friends, this week, and enjoy wherever you are on your life’s journey… it is both full of promise and excitement, and also waiting to be simply lived.

On Time

Hello! Did you miss me last Sunday? I took the week off, but it wasn’t intentional. Actually, I didn’t realize the week had even come and gone, until a friend of mine pointed out that I had not posted anything. It wasn’t until then that I realized time had simply gotten away from me. That realization made me wonder: what did I do with my time? Did I make any progress? Were any of my goals met? Was either my comfort or joy enhanced? Or was I just like a circus performer, spending time trying to keep multiple plates spinning on different sticks at one time, with no real objective other than to say, “Look at me! See how much I can do at once?”

In this life when options seem countless and priorities are in constant competition, how do you decide how to spend your time? Is it more important during a given hour to serve your spirit, taking time for meditation and prayer, or more important to serve your relationships, meeting a friend for coffee? Or should you work on your career, putting in one more hour at the office? Maybe you should focus on your health and make a stop at the gym… And once you decide, for example, to spend an hour focusing on your finances, how do you decide what is most important within that subset of potential demands? Will you be working on your tax return? Paying bills? Reviewing your investments? Writing a budget?

I wonder if this is why, because it’s so difficult to determine which of the things competing for our attention actually deserve our time, we resort to living from deadline to deadline. I think that, more often than me choosing how to spend my time, Time, that is to say, the days circled in red on my calendar, determine for me what I will be doing next. It is an absolutely crazy-making way to live.

Today I’m going to use my time, just a bit of it, to revisit my own life plan. I need to make certain that the things I am doing with my time are things that actually allow me to experience this life in the ways I choose. Sure, some of my time has to be spent in foundation building and completing basic chores, but if I don’t recognize which of those things are part of my own life vision, and start saying, “No, thank you,” to the things that don’t enhance that, time is just going to fly past me. I’m going to stop just cramming more into the day, and start recognizing which part of my best-life-plan is being served by the time I’m spending.

So, what about the time I’m spending writing this blog? Well, as it turns out, it’s a very economical usage of minutes. I get to commune with my friends (especially if you’d like to share your thoughts with me in return), spend a moment with my spirit as I re-evaluate my own struggles and passions, and practice my favored career choice of being a writer. That’s a lot of my own life vision being lived in one little activity. So, how about you? How would you like to spend your time, today? This week? This year? This fabulous lifetime?