All the Money in the World...
Recently I have been asking people what they would do if they had all the money in the world. However, based on the answers I've been receiving, I'm wondering if I'm not speaking clearly. Maybe I'm mumbling in a way that makes the word "money" sound like the word "time." Because most people answer the question "what would you do if you had all the time in the world?" rather than what I actually asked.
They would visit their aunt three times a week. They would go to yoga every morning. They would take that furniture painting class they've been talking about for the past three summers. They would do a lot of VERY ATTAINABLE things that don't require piles of money.
All I can gather from this is that money makes us feel like we have permission to spend our time doing the things we actually want to do. When we are working hard to pay the bills, it can be exhausting and we don't feel like we have the opportunity to enjoy our day. It can also be a great source of guilt-- "I should be doing something productive, I should be working." And when we finally get so fried that we are physically unable to attend to our responsibilities, we end up cross-eyed on the couch watching reruns of Friends. Maybe that's just me. Or blankly scrolling through Instagram... or pictures of cats on BuzzFeed. And all of a sudden an hour is gone.
I think this all comes out of a lack of awareness; we're not aware of what we're doing. And we're not aware of time passing, and therefore we aren't setting aside time for the things we care about. We're just spinning around feeling busy all the time, and not doing things that add meaning to our lives. But here's the thing-- we get to create the lives we want. We need to create the lives we want, because they won't just coincidentally happen without a little human intervention.
So the challenge I'm setting for myself (feel free to join me in this, if you're so inclined): write down how you would spend your days if you had all the "money" (time) in the world. Split the list up into small, attainable tasks that will lead you to an over-all happier place, and schedule time for each of them.
Let me know how it goes :)
Love Love Love,
Kat
This is a pretty cool thing. IMO the correlation is a direct result of the way our society works. We each log our hours nose to the grindstone to pay the bills. Our lifestyle through the bills steals our time because (many many) folks think in units of dollars per hour.
ReplyDeleteHow many find themselves running short on funds and think "I need a raise" which is really just "I need more money per hour" instead of "I should start a business" or "I wonder if I can make money based on my efforts instead of my time"? If the bills are paid for, if you (or I) had all the money in the world we climb down off the treadmill, we breath for awhile, maybe really just rest, probably for the first time in our adult lives, and then we move on.
Because you see, after the sightseeing, after the hobbies, after the sports cars, after the shoes... a person will either start doing what they love or keep upping the ante on their consumerism until they (eventually) die unsatisfied. It might turn out that their calling is running a soup kitchen, or memorizing minutiae of model trains trivia and giving tours of their ever expanding model train emporium cum museum. It could be as meaningful as trying to cure cancer or as "frivolous" (which if it fulfills YOU isn't really frivolous at all) as sailing port to port through the Mediterranean.
I would probably start buying up useless, damaged, "valueless" land in cities and towns and transform them into beautiful parks with fruit bearing, community building yields. This would of course be rehabilitating damaged landscapes but also providing inputs to local economies and education about food and ecosystems to places where "plants" are all too often just the things the landscaper kills.
I love this!! And I hope you do just that, because I think the world could use more beautiful parks. And I think it could also use more people who are doing what truly fills them up with joy.
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